


All Our Gifts At Once, or, the Young Sea-man

by tiltedsyllogism



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Angst, Bittersweet, Botany, Challenge 2, Gardens, I know I said angst already, Johnlock Roulette, M/M, No Major Character Death, Pastiche, Pining, Sacrifice, The little mermaid - Freeform, Tumblr: letswritesherlock, Victorian Sherlock Holmes, au: victorian, but definitely not the Disney version, but it's worth repeating, fairy tale, go read the full ending of the original HCA story, it's not as sad as you might remember, realist fairy tale, victorian au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-21
Updated: 2014-11-19
Packaged: 2017-12-20 21:31:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 48,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/892108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiltedsyllogism/pseuds/tiltedsyllogism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson, storyteller and shipwright's son, walks way from his entire life in Portsmouth to follow the mysterious Sherlock Holmes to London. </p><p>a realistic retelling of The Little Mermaid. Victorian AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Portsmouth

**Author's Note:**

> This story is a historical transposition of Hans Christian Andersen's original story: no magic, and no actual mermaids, but I am following the structure of the full original very closely. 
> 
> I'm stressing "full original" because it seems that many people are only familiar with the truncated version, in which the mermaid becomes sea foam at the end; when I was originally posting this story, I had no idea that the fuller ending was so little known. In my view, the longer version - while not exactly happy - transforms the character of the entire story, and changes it from something pointlessly tragic to a meditation on how it is possible to find happiness in a necessarily imperfect world. 
> 
> If you're interested in taking a look at the longer ending (and getting a feel for how this Fic is going to resolve) you can find the complete text here:
> 
> http://hca.gilead.org.il/li_merma.html
> 
> The extended ending (in which the mermaid does not actually become sea foam) can be found in the last four paragraphs.  
> \---  
> HUGE thanks to my incredible beta [patternofdefiance](http://archiveofourown.org/users/patternofdefiance), who was brilliant and unflagging all throughout the long process of writing this story. pattern took time and creative energy away from writing her own (gorgeous, exciting, sexy) fic to help me puzzle through the rough spots, and to help me shape this into a successful story when I was ready to give up on it. I was so alone, and I owe her so much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unbetaed, since I'm posting with maybe half an hour to spare. Some historical notes at the end. I think we're looking at maybe five chapters total?

Dusk had nearly fallen by the time John and his father set out for home; the rigging of all the ships in the dockyard loomed flat black against charcoal clouds, even as their steady creaking and the swish of the water seemed to stretch in all directions. John's back ached from long hours bent over the workbench, worse than usual because he and his father had remained an extra two hours, laying aside an extra store of planed planks to make up for the days that John would be away.

Away. A shiver brushed up John's spine and he hunched deeper into his jacket, but it was excitement and not the chill. His father's long silences sometimes made John uncomfortable on these evening walks home, but tonight the thrum of anticipation filled him near to bursting, and he was grateful that he did not need to talk. 

Their walk took them along the main streets of Portsmouth, quieter than usual because of the late hour. They trudged in a silence of their own past the shops just closing and the pubs just opening, as well as a few already open long hours, spilling light and mirth onto the open street. The street grew quieter, and the paving-stones less even, until memory steered them unerringly through the thick darkness down their own little lane. They were still a few houses away when Harry flung open the door, impatient and beaming.

"Hurry up, then!" she cried, and John could hear her smile even if the golden square of light behind her threw her face into darkness. "Somebody's birthday dinner is getting cold!"

John stopped in the doorway to hug his sister and give her a peck on the cheek before ducking into the house to do the same to his gran as she rose from the table, laughing. "We near thought you'd fallen in the harbor, you so late with beef waiting on the table at home," she chided, but her eyes were merry. 

"I can't wait, Gran," John returned warmly. He pulled off his boots and stood them in the corner while Harry and their grandmother moved plates and pots from the cook-stove to the table. John took his place behind his habitual chair, resting his hands on the back, and a moment later his gran moved to the place beside him while Harry drummed her fingers on the back of her own chair opposite. 

John's father at last stepped to the table, and the four joined hands and dipped their heads. His right hand in his father's left, John felt, as he always did, the effort it cost the quiet man to gather himself for speech of any significance. 

"Heavenly Father," he murmured, "we thank you for your countless blessings, for this good food, and for the comforts of family. We ask in particular that you be with John as he takes his days of travel." John couldn't help squeezing his father's hand slightly, his and Gran's both, at the surge of excitement he felt just thinking of the day. His father continued in a tone sharpened slightly in reproof. "Lord, bless us and keep us for the sake of our trust in you, you who know each of us by name, and for the sake of your Son in whose name we pray. Amen." 

They took their seats and began passing plates in familiar rhythms. To have beef on the table was a rare pleasure, and for a few minutes they ate in appreciative silence.

"It's all wonderful," John said, coming up for air between bites. "Thank you both so much."

"Mmm. Ta." Harry lifted her glass as if to toast, even though it contained only water. "And don't forget the marmalade roll for afters."

"It's a big year, Johnny," Gran said, smiling at him. "Twenty makes you a man."

"He looks the same to me," said Harry teasingly. 

"You just wait till the day after tomorrow," he replied, taking up the jest. "I'll walk in the door and you won't recognize me."

"And maybe we won't, at that," said Gran softly. 

He met her eyes, at a loss for how to thank her properly; it was she who had interceded with their father to secure these few days for each of her grandchildren. She herself had been to Winchester twice, and once even to London, when she was young. "Yes," was all he said, in the end. 

"So where are you going to go, John?" Harry asked. "How far can you get?" She wasn't nearly so interested as John was in the world beyond Portsmouth; for Harry, the city's two harbours framed world enough between them, and her two days of adventure had come and gone without her leaving the island, let alone the town. But she had tramped all over the city with John, his small hand in hers to take him away from their house and its smell of sickness, and knew even before Gran how the imposing stone monuments surrounding the naval base held him spellbound; and later, when they were a bit older and walking farther and longer to get out from under their father's grief, she would dutifully follow him up the hill at the north edge of the city to look out on the rest of England rolling away northward. After mum fell ill there hadn't been money enough to spare John's labor or Harry's even to send them to the ragged school for a few hours a day, so the monuments remained as mysterious and unreadable as the view from the hills. But to John they spoke all the same of a wider world, a world where men could think and speak and act and change the world thereby; a world where every day, and every person, didn't fade one into the other. Harry was happy enough that her entire world should be in Portsmouth, but she knew that her brother felt otherwise. 

John fiddled with his fork. Even after changing plans a dozen times over, he had settled on how to spend his precious days of freedom over a month ago, but he still felt a bit shy talking about it as if it were something real. "I reckon I'll go to Wight," he answered, "since it is merely a few hours to cross the Solent. I would like to see the cliffs. Or," he said lightly, as if it were no matter,"perhaps I'll see if I can catch sight of a party at Osborne House." Harry clucked her tongue, scandalized; their father's face remained trained on his plate, but John read astonishment there all the same. "Not to interfere, of course; merely to see what I can from a distance." John flushed as he spoke, and felt a bit foolish; the Queen was certainly in London for the season, and the younger members of the family were most unlikely to sojourn there. All the same, he thought defiantly, he had only this one chance, and so of course he must take it. But he spoke instead of the humbler sights of Wight, of the abbey and the country villages and the reported beauty of the northern headlands.

Gran's face was soft with affection. "What wonderful things you'll see."

"And what stories you'll have for us upon return, eh Johnny?" His father looked up suddenly, face crinkling in the dim light, confident at last of something he could say to his son as if he knew him. 

John smiled back, tried to push it all the way into his eyes. "Sure, da." 

"You'll be warming us of a cold evening for years, I don't doubt, just from this one trip," said Harry. 

"I suppose we can only hope that interesting sights will cross my path," John returned. He knew Harry's enthusiasm for a well-told tale was sincere, and that she treasured John's stories in particular, but he suddenly felt very tired. "Let's see about that marmalade roll, perhaps."

Later, after the meal was cleaned up and everyone in the family had retreated to their corners for the night, John's exhaustion deserted him as suddenly as it had come. He found himself struck almost with panic: his days out in the world were so close that they were already almost over, and all the many things he wished to see seemed already to be slipping beyond his grasp. He squeezed his eyes shut where he lay, and tried his best to pray that this one brush with the world beyond his little seaport city would bring him a chance to see what the people of that wider world were like, not just the same small bustlings he could find at home but matters of significance, people and deeds that deserved to be remembered. John knew he had a gift for storytelling, a rare gift, but what he really wanted was a story that would last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Historical/geographical notes:  
> * Ragged schools were charity schools founded to educate impoverished children in the working-class districts in some of the cities of the British Isles. Although the ragged school movement was well-established across the country by the late 1860s, which is when this story is (very cloudily) set, one of the very first such schools was in Portsmouth, founded and run by John Pounds, a shoemaker who also wished to provide basic education for his disabled nephew. Many of the schools (Pounds' included) would offer food as a lure or incentive to potential students. I know next to nothing about the economics of industrial cities in 19th century England, let alone the practical concerns that a family like John and Harry's would have faced, but it strikes me as very unlikely that financial concerns alone would have prevented John from attending the school, if he had really wanted to learn how to read. But there you have it.
> 
> * Osborne House is an estate on the northern tip of the Isle of Wight, built by Victoria and Albert as a summer home for the royal family and much beloved by the Queen in particular (who died there in 1901). Its grounds are extensive, and include a walled garden and a private beach on the bay. The house is now in the public trust and is open to visitors.


	2. The Isle of Wight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow, this ended up being much longer (both in delay and in wordcount) than anticipated. next chapter may be a week or so, but it should be faster after that. 
> 
> Many thanks to the anti-Diogenistas for writing solidarity, and to patternofdefiance for the beta. Her stuff is great. I would link you to it ~~if I were more technologically adept~~ but I detest legwork.
> 
> Oh, and if you read the first chapter back when it first went up, before I added notes, it might be a good idea to go back and read them before diving in here.

It was before dawn when John slipped quietly out of the house and through the streets of Stamshaw, down toward the quay. Portsmouth Harbour saw enough traffic to the Isle of Wight that the ferry ran several times a day, but John had jolted awake in those deep cold hours and did not deceive himself that he would be able to get to sleep again. 

John rarely visited the eastern harbour, and did not recognize any of the faces already milling in the early light. The next ferry was not due to depart for nearly an hour, so he doubled back to one of the pastry-shops near the wharf and bought a pasty, which seemed to be what many of the shop’s regular customers were buying. Back on the quay, John paid for his passage and then stood about, attempting to look as though he belonged. He took the pasty out of his pocket and promptly burned his tongue.

He didn’t want to be the first on the ferry, for fear of looking over-eager, but once some others had moved up the gangplank John followed them aboard, walking as slowly as he could manage to the far railing. The Isle could be seen, if only dimly, a hulk of grey beyond the curls of mist rising from the Solent. The river fog had already begun to thin when the boat lurched underneath him, forcing him to grab at the railing as though the water were new, as though he hadn’t spent his entire life within half a mile of this very coastline. 

John wasn’t going far, and would be back again by nightfall tomorrow; yet somehow it still seemed as if everything he knew was passing out of reach.

It wasn’t that John had any illusions about what would happen, after he returned from this little adventure: he would go back to the shipyards, back to his father’s workbench, which would become his in turn. If, by that point, Harry were married and secure, he might be able to come back like this, again, for a day or two at a time, and pretend that he might have been more than a builder of ships, a pair of anonymous hands shaping planks for people who looked at a boat and saw beginnings rather than endings.

“You do know, Johnny,” his gran had said softly one evening, when he was far too young to be the only one in the house still awake with her, “there’s a happiness in the quiet life.” John had stayed up watching the fire burn down in the grate, trying to fix in his memory all of the details of the map outside the Naval base, which he had seen that day for only the third time ever. Gran was up knitting and drinking nettle broth for her arthritis, and her eyes stayed on her needles while she talked. “There’s nobody out there changing the world, none of them, but feels it on his shoulders.” 

He had said nothing in reply, he remembered, but only kept staring at the coals, until he felt her hand squeeze his knee. He had wrapped his arms around himself, and turned to her and said “I love you, Gran” because it was the only thing he could think of to say that was true, and she had smiled at him. And he knew that expression like his own two hands, but for the first time he saw how sad it was.

And so his mind was back in their little house in Stamshaw as the ferry ground up against the pilings of the dock at Wight, and he was somewhere else for the first time.

 

\---

 

The woods were quiet around him as John hiked toward the northern part of the Island. It was late afternoon. He had spent the morning in Ryde, of whose many churches he had heard report but whose splendor surpassed all his imaginings; indeed, the windows of colored glass at St. Mary’s, cunningly pieced to present beautiful pictures in radiant blocks of color, all but took his breath away. He lingered long over his lunch at a pub across the square, working out how to capture in words those glowing images, before he realized that it was for nothing; for he dared not admit to anyone at home that he had been inside the papists' church. That was a sobering thought, and defiance stirred within him (aimed vaguely at his father’s face) even as he felt half-ashamed; but he cheered himself with a few minutes spent watching the local people as they took their own lunches, talking and arguing and laughing in a distinctive lilt which, he noted with delight, was not quite like what one heard in Portsmouth.

And then he had put Ryde at his back and made his way westward, explaining to himself and to the farmer whom he had asked for directions that he planned to visit the two castles in the district; he did not need to form the words in his mind to know that this would put him right in the way of Osborne House. Deliberately to plan to walk the grounds of the royal estate, to haunt the private grottoes where the royal family and their associates sought respite and retreat, would be ungracious at least, inappropriate in the extreme; and of course there might be trouble if he were caught. But John nonetheless felt himself drawn inexorably to Osborne, hoping against both probability and propriety that he might be afforded the opportunity to observe some of the royal guests as they took their leisure, or possibly even the royal family themselves. 

The northern coast of the Isle was richly wooded, with trees growing to the very shoreline; but as he came to a little inlet, both skyscape and waterscape opened before him, and he paused a moment to absorb the view: a narrow strip of virgin beach spread out before him, and the stretch of the Solent that lapped softly at the sand looked as innocent of human touch as the beach itself. He stepped out from beneath the trees, almost afraid to intrude on something so beautiful. The soft shifting beneath his boots was too much altogether, and he took them off and pushed his toes into the clean dry sand, and closed his eyes and turned his face to the lowering sun, and felt happier than he ever had in his life.

His reverie was broken by the dim hum of voices across the water. Coming back to himself, John caught sight of a boat coming toward him down the river, and he cocked his head, straining to catch the wisps of almost-intelligible sound. Gradually the boat drew nearer, resolving ever clearer as it came, and all of an instant John was suddenly aware of two things: that this was quite a small craft, a pleasure boat designed to hold no more than nine or ten people, and that the voices drifting from it flowed in cadences and accents profoundly unfamiliar. John’s stomach lurched, having reached the logical conclusion in advance of his mind: it was a party from Osborne House. A moment later, he was riven with consternation, and the fierce conviction that he must not be seen: he was unsure whether the stretch of coast he trod was strictly private, but the sense of invading the privacy of the pleasure party overwhelmed him all the more vividly for its late arrival. 

John dropped quietly back among the trees, then thought better of his retreat and crept back out toward the river, keeping behind the tree line so that he would be invisible from the water, even though he was much closer to the river itself. Peering back out at the approaching boat, he saw that it was traveling swiftly, but also quite close to shore, no doubt caught in one of the peculiar double tides that made the Solent so pleasant and so dangerous for pleasure-boating. In fact, he realized (with a prickle somewhere between distress and elation), it would pass not twenty feet from where he was hidden.

The boat was now close enough that he could make out the people aboard. There seemed to be a roughly equal mix of gentlemen and ladies, the former in elegant jackets and trousers and the latter in splendid and elaborate dresses. The conversation among them seemed to be lively, but it was clear that one figure was dominating the discourse while the others provided a lively chorus of response. The main speaker, an extremely tall gentlemen with a great deal of dark hair, spoke in a voice too low to carry, but his bodily movements suggested to John that, although it as clearly he who drove the conversation, he was also enjoying it rather less than the rest. Even at this distance, the thick hum of small sounds from the riverbank still masking his voice, John found himself mesmerized by the speaker, his expansive gestures at once ungainly and yet somehow devastatingly elegant. 

“But I say, Holmes,” one of the gentlemen, portly and sandy-haired, broke in, his sharp voice carrying where the earlier speaker’s did not. “Surely you are taking it a bit far? Even Paley grants that development has taken place among life forms. Must we really deny-“

“Must?” broke in the tall elegant man, his voice a deep thrum. “Surely not; indeed my whole point is that we have been propelled by happy accident rather than divine imperative. You _may_ remain as ignorant as you please. There is nothing you _must_ do except eat, sleep, defecate, and die.”

This comment provoked a mixture of astonished gasps from the ladies and loud laughter from the man, though Holmes’s sandy-haired interlocutor seemed affronted, and a quite fetching young lady in blue seated just behind him drew her hand to her mouth in a gesture that, John was sure, was meant to mask a smile. Another of the men murmured a comment that John couldn’t catch – even though by this time the boat was perhaps only thirty feet upriver from where he stood concealed – but from the further mirth it provoked, he thought he could hazard a guess.

The laughter turned abruptly to cries of astonishment and dismay as the boat heaved to the side and its pace dropped to a slow drift. John was long familiar with the Solent’s treacherous double-tides, but the pleasure party were clearly not so well acquainted; every one of them staggered, a few braced themselves against the boat’s sides, and one of the men fell to sitting. As the boat held steady in its new, slower current stream, everyone aboard began to ease themselves back, more cautious in their postures than before. Holmes, who John now saw had grasped the arm of one of his male companions to steady himself, now released the gentleman, who briefly grasped his elbow in reassurance. 

“Well there’s a stroke of divine retribution for us,” said the gentleman next to Holmes, and the whole party laughed, as much in relief as in mirth. John felt a twist of worry, seeing them all relax. Surely, he thought, they could not understand so little of river currents to think themselves past all danger; and yet by the look of them they thought exactly that. “And now I wonder if-“

But the speaker was cut off as the boat lurched horribly to one side, and John’s heart did the same, for this time the party were, if anything more badly startled; everyone who was not already seated toppled over entirely, one lady and two men – including Holmes – tumbled headlong into the water. 

John nearly broke cover, then, but held himself still in the trees as the people on the boat recovered themselves and went to the aid of those in the water. Holmes’s neighbor jumped into the water port side to come to the aid of the lady who had fallen, two other men leaned over to help the man who had fallen over starboard side, and another man reached out to help Holmes where he had righted himself and was treading water a few feet away, and seemed even to be dismissing the proffered hand. John had just relaxed when the boat heaved rightward, tipping dizzily sideways and upsetting those standing before righting itself in a much swifter current stream – perhaps the one it had been in before – on which it began once again to travel swiftly. The other two who had fallen into the river were already more than halfway back in the boat, but Holmes was still in the water; and as the boat hurled forward on the rapid current, the hull struck him on the head. The horror bloomed all too slowly in John’s mind, and by the time the knowledge of it had traveled his bloodstream from eyes to limbs, the boat was nearly fifty feet downstream, and none of those aboard – still steadying themselves, or engaged in helping those most shaken – seemed to realize that Holmes was not among them. 

John flung himself out of the trees and dashed into the water, heedless now of the risk that might ensue if one of the boaters were to see him. Thigh-deep in sun-warmed water, John scanned desperately, trying to catch sight of a human form. He lunged first toward one dark shape and then another, recognizing them a few seconds into the pursuit for the chimeras they were, mere shadows of the riverbed. He had nearly despaired when he saw what could only be a human arm, the hand pale and limp, unnervingly like a dead thing, bobbing in a still patch of water. John’s mind flashed briefly back to an elegant figure drawn in the air by long, pale fingers as he made for Holmes, much farther out toward the middle of the river than John would have guessed. The currents pushed at his arms and his side as he cut through them, and he felt himself beginning to tire when the arm dropped below the surface. Terror gave him renewed strength, and in the next moment John had reached the place where Holmes should be. Almost instantly his thrashing hand met wet cloth, and he caught the limb and drew it toward him. Taking advantage of the relative calm of their spot in the river, John held steady and struggled with the body until Holmes’s dark head broke the surface. His face was deadly still, but blood was still welling freely from a cut at his hairline – where the boat had struck him, no doubt – and John took this for a good sign. He draped Holmes’s long arms around his neck, wrapped his own left arm around the gentleman’s waist, and turned back toward the river bank.

It was an exhausting journey, for John was by now quite tired, and bearing double the weight of his outward journey, with only one arm to propel them forward, and was moving largely against the current besides. John’s stroke became shorter, even as he was agonizingly aware that there would need to be more of them. The chill of the deeper water had leached into him at some point, and though he was by now back in the warmer shallows, he still felt achingly cold. But at last, on a downward stroke of his arm, his fingers brushed sand; putting his feet beneath him, he dragged himself and Holmes the last few feet up to dry sand. Once they were well clear of the river, he rolled Holmes over onto his side and thumped at his back until Holmes sputtered and began coughing up river water. Seeing that the man was now past danger, John left him to it and collapsed.

After a few moments of simply breathing and soaking in the thin traces of warmth from the sand beneath him, John turned to look at the man next to him on the sand. Holmes was now breathing evenly, though he still appeared to be unconscious. The cut on his brow was still bleeding sluggishly. John fished a handkerchief of out the man’s breast pocket, wrung it out, and dabbed at the cut, realizing as he did so that Holmes had gone alarmingly cold. He was, he realized, quite cold himself; the sun had sunk low, and his muscles were stiffening. John glanced about, and – seeing nobody near-by either to help or to observe – rolled over and carefully draped himself over the taller man’s body. It was only practical, given that Holmes was still unconscious and John was almost too weary to move even himself; but after a few moments, as their bodies began to warm with shared heat and the feeling returned to John’s skin, it was also almost terrifyingly intimate. John had not embraced anybody, other than his gran and occasionally Harry, in many years. He had shaken hands with friends, and sometimes with strangers. The second foreman at the shipyard, who was fond of John, had occasionally clapped him on the shoulder. And now he was sharing touch, sharing breath, with this man who had never laid eyes on John, who did not even know of his existence.

John leaned back slightly to study the face of this intimate stranger whose life he had saved. Up close, Holmes was just as striking as he had been at a distance, with cheekbones that reminded John of the churches he had visited earlier in the day, and a mouth that he very quickly and deliberately stopped thinking about. Even unconscious, it was a face that bespoke keen intelligence – but no, that was foolish, he was getting carried away. John dropped his head back to the man’s shoulder, and Holmes shifted slightly beneath him, turning his head to rub his cheek against John’s hair. His long fingers fluttered where they lay on his thigh, and before John quite realized what he was doing, he had moved his hand to cover Holmes’s, letting his own fingers drop between the other man’s. He was unsure whether or not he knew why his heart was pounding.

And so they lay folded together for some time, as the broad reach of the sky sank toward darkness.

The pale sand and Holmes’s fair skin had just begun to take on the blue luminescence of evening when a human voice floated across the river. John sat up, a bit slow in his reluctance; he could not make out the contours of the words, but was nonetheless certain that what he had heard was “Holmes”. Peering through the perplexing haze of late evening, he could make out a boat coming down the river. There seemed to be only a few figures aboard, and John could see even at a distance that the craft was being handled by somebody familiar with the Solent’s currents. 

John hesitated for only a moment. Holmes was clearly out of danger. Surely the men in the boat would see him on the bank. It would do nobody any good for John to be found here, with him – his heart balked at the thought of accepting a reward, and there was just as likely to be trouble as any happier kind of recompense. Still, it sparked a peculiar pain in his chest to leave the man behind after the intense dealings of the prior hour, without exchanging so much as a word with him. John drew a long breath and squeezed the man’s hand lightly before withdrawing it. In that moment, Holmes’s eyes flew suddenly open. He blinked up at John, seemingly in the grip of confusion, and John stared back just as unnerved, for the eyes meeting his were an unearthly silver-grey, and in the uncanny light of evening the man’s strange awakening it was enough to make John shiver.

Holmes started upward, lifting a hand toward John, but then just as suddenly reeled back, drawing his hand to his forehead. The breaking of their mutual gaze awoke John from whatever arrest had caught him, and he ducked back into the woods, stopping only when the trees masked the light from the riverbank completely. There he stood, listening, as a few male voices – surely those from the boat – first came into hearing distance, and then a few minutes later changed timbre as they left the water behind.

“Holmes, are you all right?” asked one of the voices. “He’s all right,” came the same voice a moment later, evidently directed to others behind him. Holmes said something too faint to carry through the trees, and slowly John began to creep forward again.

“Pendleton came dashing up to the house half an hour ago, saying you’d fallen from the boat and none knew where,” the first voice continued, and now John was close enough to see a chestnut-haired gentleman kneeling next to Holmes, one hand on his shoulder. “I’m so relieved you’re all right, you’ve no idea. We were terrified. We can take you back now. Here, let me help you.” He stooped further and wrapped an arm around Holmes’s shoulders, helping him first to sit up and then, more slowly, to standing. Holmes kept one hand to his head, evidently in pain and perhaps confused as well. He allowed his companion to lead him the few steps down the beach to the boat, but before stepping in he swung suddenly round and stared at the treeline. John knew there was no way that Holmes could see him, deep as he was in the thick shadow of the trees, but he nonetheless felt caught just as he had when Holmes had first looked at him. 

“Holmes?” came another of the voices, probably one who had stayed in the boat. 

“Yes, I’m fine,” that gentlemen replied, then turned back and boarded the boat. John stepped to the very edge of the trees as the boat drew out onto the river, watching as it disappeared. He felt the flatness of exhaustion descend on him as he turned to his left to trudge upstream, back to where, many lifetimes ago, he had dropped his boots.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Solent is actually known for its treacherous currents. Whether or not they are treacherous in the precise way that I have described here I cannot report.


	3. Southsea Common

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> many thanks to patternofdefiance for being an awesome beta. sorry for the long delay! I'm done traveling for the summer, it shouldn't be so long between chapters from this point forward.
> 
> \------

John’s family did not press him, right away, to tell them what he had seen in his travels. They knew him for his father’s son; it was not unusual for him to pass an occasional day or even two in thoughtful quiet. And - although he did not miss the inquiring glances that met him at breakfast the morning of his return, and when he returned home for supper that evening, and for the evenings that followed - they nonetheless seemed content to let him divulge the tale of his travels once the strange silence he had brought home with him had lifted.

But it did not lift.

In the past, John had always talked easily enough with neighbors and strangers alike, out on the docks or after church. And when friends or family gathered together after a meal or a prayer meeting, it was only a matter of time before some-one asked him to tell a story. He did not always oblige these requests - for it took the proper frame of mind - but when he did, whether he gave them a comic episode from a recent trip to the shops or a tale from Scripture whose every in and out was well-known to all, he could hold a room spellbound for an hour or more.

But John knew, bone-deep, that he could not tell anyone about the man he had rescued on that night away – he could not possibly communicate the truth of it, even if he dared – and there did not seem to be anything worth saying about anything else.

John had spent that night stretched out wakeful on the sand, watching the water of the Solent tumble past, as it had done since Creation, as it had done only a few hours ago when bore Holmes and his companions down the river and away from John; watching, and wondering what might have been, if only he had been brave enough to stay. His original design had been to ask for lodging in a farm-house, but after the events by the river, he had found that he preferred its company to that of other people. And he had passed most of the next day prowling around the outskirts of Osborne House, hoping and fearing in equal measure that he would have a second opportunity to speak to Holmes. He did not pretend to himself that he was content with the hour he spent observing a group of gentlemen discussing minor affairs of state while they strolled the Terrace Gardens – even though such an occurrence would have seemed the pinnacle of his fondest hopes only the day before – for there had been no curly dark head among them. John had turned back toward Ryde only in the late afternoon, when his yawning stomach and anxiety over catching the last ferry had at last overmastered him. He had spent almost all of his remaining coins on an enormous meal at the same homely little pub before boarding the ferry for home, but a different sort of emptiness had remained with him.

Portsmouth, if anything, seemed bigger upon John’s return: full of clashing smells and colors, no stretch of air that was not pierced through by noise, the whole vibrant and squalid tumble of it boxed in by wood and steel and stone. After the broad, gracious spread of the country estates and their gardens, and the quiet stretches of uninhabited wood and green and sand, Portsmouth was too many things, crammed into too small a space. It wore him out; he woke up tired. And the ache at the back of his chest when he laid himself down each night did not recede, and lingered long into the day.

“Come back to us, John.” Music, voices, the light of early evening; and Harry, smiling, in front of him and holding out a cup of punch. John blinked up at his sister as he slowly came back to himself and to the festivities whirling around them. “Come on now,” she said, pushing the cup toward him and grinning impishly. “Da isn’t to know, of course, but we’ll just have to be sure to stay out until after he’s asleep.”

"And be steady again by the morning,” John returned, accepting the cup, and managed a small smile of his own. Harry made a scoffing noise but did not reply. Half the city turned out for the fair put on by the Shipwrights’ Friendly and Trade Association every midsummer, and Southsea Common was crowded with people: hawkers wandered amidst the crowds of revelers, selling dumplings and pasties and glasses of ale, and music drifted across the open square from the dancing area over by the castle. Their father, deacon though he now was, knew he could not discourage them from attending, worry though he might about public drunkenness and other sorts of debauchery; but it still would not do to bring the subject to their own door.

Harry took a sip of her own drink and sat down next to him on the bench. Together they watched the noisy milling crowd filter around them. After a moment he noticed his sister eyeing him sidelong, and realized she had caught him as his eyes had strayed, yet again, to the young couples strolling at the perimeter of the common, arm in arm. He smiled at her, a bit sheepish. She held his gaze a moment, then abruptly dropped her eyes to the cup in her hands.

“You haven't, yet, you know,” Harry said evenly. "Come back." Her eyes flickered up briefly, but it seemed she could not look at him and speak at the same time. "And it's been weeks, now." John realized that she had been working up the courage to say this to him for some days; and that knowledge that she felt so distant, that she was in need of courage to talk to him, briefly outstripped the slow-gathering thrum of panic that she had noticed, that she _knew_.

He put his hand on her arm and sought out her eyes. "I am sorry, Harry."

She gave a mirthless laugh. "What was so remarkable that you cannot bear even to speak of it? Or perhaps it was awful, this thing that changed you. I wonder, will you ever deign to tell us?" A throb of shame passed through him at that, and he made to withdraw his hand, but she caught it with hers, pressed it to her arm. "No, I'm sorry, that was unjust. But John, I wish you would trust me." She moved his hand to take it in both of hers. "I know I am... I know I don't always see things as you do. But I will try to understand."

John sighed, wondering how was he to talk about that strange and turbulent hour, the elegant movement of hands and the strange light eyes that continued to haunt him. His encounter with Holmes was seared into John’s senses – the raw terror, the cold slice of the river water, that elusive but haunting line of almost-warmth between their bodies in the deepening chill of the evening – but it had also taken on a dreamlike quality. It was only the strength of those ferociously clear sense-memories that anchored him in the certainty that he had seen and touched and held – if not actually spoken to – that strange and graceful man who seemed to belong to an entirely different world than John’s own. How was he to explain to Harry, so quick to gossip and to tease, what he could not make sense of even to himself? But her eyes were serious, even troubled, as she met his gaze again, and he knew that he must try.

"I." He cleared his throat. "I did go, to. To Osborne House." Harry sucked in a breath and gave one of the half-stifled but still brilliant smiles that still made their gran tear up sometimes with remembering their mother. She laughed incredulously, and John laughed too, a bit. "I know. I did."

"That's amazing," said Harry, half-breathless with wonder. "The gardens, did you see them, were they brilliant?" Seeing the look on his face, she laughed. "Oh, never mind, you probably didn't pay a whit of attention. But what _happened_?" Her smile suddenly dropped away. "Was it horrible? You look- oh, you look so sad."

"No, it was - well, I don't know. Maybe. I." He paused. The laughing and shouting of the crowd around them pressed in on John, as though mocking his hesitation. He drew in a fortifying breath. "I - saw someone. We did not- we did not speak. But I." He paused, casting about for the right words, but they did not come.

Harry looked away, sighing. "Oh, John." She squeezed his hand and turned back toward him, her eyes filled with an unbearable sympathy.

John's body seemed to realize her mistake a moment before his mind did; he was already snatching his hand back as he realized how she had misunderstood. "No," he burst out sharply, then caught himself and struggled to mend his tone. "It's not like that," he said, more quietly. "It was - I only...." again he trailed off, frustrated, his throat thickening with emotion long suppressed. It was at once too simple and too complicated to explain the sweet and impossible promise that Holmes's company seemed to hold. It was in any case, he realized again (as though it were new, though it was not) entirely out of his reach. And with that, despair cut like a cold sunbeam through his cloudy consternation, and he could speak again. "It was a gentleman. That I saw. A scientist, I think. He seemed.... interesting to talk to," he concluded lamely.

Harry was quiet a moment, considering, while John played with his empty cup and tried not to think about long white fingers threaded between his own. "Do you know his name?"

"His name is Holmes. He was part of a party in from London, making only a brief stay at Osborne; they will have long since returned to the capitol. That is all I know."

"So not very much."

"Not very much at all." Harry fell silent, thinking. The music started up again, over to their right; he had not even noticed that it had ceased. It seeped into even the pockets of relative quiet among the people laughing and shouting, and John desperately wished to put himself out of the reach of that unremitting clamor. Closing his eyes, he fought the impulse to sink back into that cool, still evening by the Solent. It became harder, the more he worked over the memory in his mind, not to alter it slightly, change it to suit his retrospective longings: to touch Holmes’s marble-carved face, or to stay and meet his silvery stare rather than bolting for the trees. But the fantasy never progressed any further, for what could he possibly have said or done? Through the sweet hum of regret, he became slowly aware of a rasping pain in his hand, and looking down, discovered that his knuckles were bloody where he had been grinding them into the rough edge of the bench. Alarmed, he cradled his damaged fingers to his chest and glanced over at Harry, but she had not noticed. 

"Tom Farragut's second cousin,” she said at last. “He is in London. I'm sure he would help you find lodging and a situation of some kind. I'm sure you could discover your Mr. Holmes with a bit of time."

"Yes, and then what?" John said bitterly. "Apply for a post in his household? Well, all right. Perhaps he could use me as a porter. Or possibly an ostler in his stables. What use has such a man for an illiterate shipwright?" And this, this was why John had not brazened out this line of thought. Better to live with the nebulous fantasy that he might somehow, someday be an assistant - or perhaps even a friend - to Holmes, sit at table with him among statesmen and poets and scientists. But that was not John's world, and wishing did not change that; the very fact that he could forget the distance between Holmes and himself was itself a measure of how little of that world he knew. "No, Harry, there is no point to it. I cannot- I cannot have what I want. To be closer in proximity would only make that the more clear." He stared fiercely at the packed earth beneath his feet. "At least I know what I am, here."

"So do I, John," Harry said softly. "And that is why I want to help you leave." John glanced up swiftly, and saw her face sad and set. "You've had the itch in you since you were tiny. It's all been waiting, for you, up till now. Even Da knows it." She paused, swallowed, smiled. "I'm just glad you have no taste for life at sea, or we'd never see you again."

He smiled back at the taste of an old joke. "Yes, well, it's a bit dirty, isn't it?" he said gravely.

Harry nodded, likewise grave. "And nobody to do your laundry. You'd be lost."

They held onto their solemnity for just a moment more before collapsing into giggles like children. They had nearly recovered when John managed to cough out "you would come along, of course, but where would you get the soap?" and sent them into fresh hysterics. Through the pleasant ache of too much laughter, John felt that his chest had grown looser, somehow, and in it he discovered the calm certainty that Harry was right: not only could he leave, but he must. And she understood.

"Thank you, Har," John said, when they had finally stopped laughing.

She smiled back, though her eyes were shadowed again. "Don't you worry," she said, teasing, "we'll catch you your man yet." And suddenly her eyes went round. " _Oh._ "

"What is it?" John asked.

She met his gaze, eyes still wide. "There's the Baroness. Perhaps she would help you."

John frowned. "Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean."

Harry rolled her eyes. "That's because you never listen when I'm talking about the mill."

"That's not true," John protested. "Look, I can- they've got you drilling now, you haven't worked the riveting hammer for three months or more, and if you give me a moment I can tell you the exact day."

"Yes, all right, but I mean the _gossip._ Do you remember anything about Mary Anne?"

"Is - she the Baroness?"

Harry laughed and shook her head. "Baron Adler's new wife - well, not new, he brought her to Sandleford nearly two years ago, now. And she _is_ rather mysterious, but her title is genuine enough. _Mary Anne_ works the lathe. But her sister Lucy was always weak in the lungs - but very beautiful, or so Mary Anne says - and she managed to secure an audience with the Baroness just last month, to ask if she might not be found a place in some great house, to spare her all the heat and cold." Harry leaned in, conspiratorial, as though she could have made herself heard to anyone else even by shouting. "And now, Lucy is attending _the Earl of Whitehurst_."

John took a moment to absorb this. He did remember Mary Anne, now – a cheerful girl with flaxen hair and a wide smile who also lived in Stamshaw and had come by their home a few times, accompanying Harry home from the factory. She had been pleasant enough, John supposed, if unremarkable. 

“I don't understand," he said at last. "Why would a noblewoman take an interest in this girl's welfare?"

"I don't know," Harry returned. "But she did. She does send some people away, who come to petition her. But she helped Lucy, even though she had no money or connections of any kind.” Harry’s eyes sparkled in triumph. “And perhaps she would help you as well."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had started off the story assuming that Harry would work at a textile mill, but a bit of research turned up the fact that the textile industry was concentrated in the north. So instead, Harry's factory makes pulley blocks, which are the metal bits used to secure ropes and spars on a ship. The Portsmouth Block Mills were among the very first factories to go mechanized, shortly after the turn of the century, and as such were an important turning point in the Industrial Revolution; the machines were, at least at first operated only by men, but I have imagined here that this practice has shifted over the half-century-plus, in response both to broader economic changes and the changing needs of the factory itself as the machinery aged. 
> 
> Although the shipwrights in the UK began building a trade union on a regional scale in 1882, local trade societies or associations such as the one I have imagined here (the Portsmouth Shipwrights' Friendly and Trade Association) were common, in many different industries. And that really is the kind of name they had.


	4. Sandleford, near Eastleigh

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks to the wonderful patternofdefiance for betaing.

John set out for Sandleford one week later, to seek an audience with the Baroness Adler. Not under cover of darkness, as his imagination had wildly suggested when first he began to consider it possible, but in almost complete secrecy nonetheless. Harry covered for him, in the end. It meant he had to wait until after breakfast to depart, if he wished to avoid lying to their father directly; Harry could spin a very convincing fib out of sheer confidence, but there was no way John could claim only to be attending church with their mother’s cousins across town, if he were caught slinking out so early, and he had no talent for confabulation. But brother and sister could discover no better plan between them, and it meant at least that his absence would not look suspicious until late in the day.

And so he turned his feet toward his cousin’s church in Buckland until he had put a few streets between himself and their house, before cutting northward toward the new steel bridge at the western end of Portsbridge Creek. John had crossed the creek dozens of times before – wading through its shallow flats in the morning hours, or picking his way dry-shod across the reed beds in the height of afternoon - and climbed to the crest of Portsdown Hill, so there was no reason that crossing it now should feel momentous. Except perhaps that this time it was not the end of his trek, but the beginning; Sandleford lay nearly three hours’ walk north and west. But it was, John thought as he endured the rhythmic and unfamiliar clang of steel beneath his feet, the railing a cold smooth trace beneath his fingertips, a beginning that breathed endings of its own.

The mild weather of the early morning soon gave way to a fine but steady rain, and although the downs proved to be easy and pleasant terrain for walking, John found that it took most of his concentration to keep his direction. Twenty minutes’ walk had carried him farther from the shoreline than he had ever been in his life, and although he could still locate the sun through the mist that filmed it, the glare of it – magnified by the thin gauzy layer of cloud that shirred the sky to the horizon – dazzled his eyes and made his head ache. Keeping his gaze fixed on the ground just in front of him to ward off the penetrating brightness of that sunwashed expanse, pausing occasionally to make sure of his course. By the third hour of walking, his head was throbbing from the invasive incandescence, and every step seemed to jar in his skull. It was only when he noticed the clumped grasses of the heath giving way to smooth lawns beneath his feet that he looked up to see a stately manor house off to his right, on a small rise, and felt nothing but a dull inkling of relief.

And so it was that John was damp, disheveled and utterly out of sorts as he stepped to the main door of the gracious house. He stood before the imposing double doors for a full two minutes before working up the wherewithal to knock, and wondered only afterward whether it should have taken courage to do so.

After a moment, the door was opened by a red-headed girl in neat but elegant dress, who looked to be about John’s age. Behind her, he could see the dim outlines of a room of some significant dimension, carpeted in deep blue. John was suddenly keenly aware of the wear at the cuffs of his best coat and the roughness of his boots. His tongue seized in his mouth.

“Yes, who is calling?” she asked. John relaxed slightly at the gentle cadences of her voice; however smart her costume, the girl’s accent told him that she was South Hampshire born and bred, likely in a house no more splendid than his own. 

“I would like to see Baroness Adler, please,” he said. “I’m –“ he faltered. He was nobody, and he had come on the strength of nothing other than a rumor. “I’m here to talk to her.”

The girl smiled, as though his attempt not to dissemble was something she had seen through anyway. “I will ask if she is seeing visitors today. Please come in.”

She turned, and John followed her in through a grand entryway that opened on a stairwell to the second floor (the carpet, he noticed, was evidently of a paler shade than it had seemed from beyond the threshold) and into an equally imposing sitting room, also furnished in blues. The maid waited at the door while John walked to the velvet couch in the center of the room and, feeling a resurgence of his original discomfort, stood himself at attention a little behind it. The maid bobbed her head, smiling again with just a glint of derision, and left. 

John shifted on his feet, deliberately not looking anywhere, and wondered if he ought to have sat down. Out of the punishing brightness of the sun-misted heath, the persistent ache in his eyes receded. Opening them wide, he stared at the arc of the vaulted ceiling and simply breathed, and slowly, the febrile pulse of blood in his brain seemed also to calm.

“Are you feeling better?” A musical female voice, plum but with cut-glass edges, sliced into the blue calm of his mind. John started and his eyes snapped back to the door. His eyes followed the Baroness as she slid into the room and took a seat on the grand wing chair opposite the couch John had been scrupulously avoiding. She was wearing an elaborate dress in some shade of green, and her delicate features bespoke the same high breeding as Holmes’s. Her eyes were fixed on John, lively and intent.

“It’s a bit hard on the eyes, a day like this,” she continued brightly, “and you’ve had to walk a long way, it looks like.” A note of something like sympathy had crept into her voice with this last, but John, even as he still struggled to master himself and address her, already knew that he did not trust it. She wasn’t cruel, he didn’t think – at least not yet – but there was something unsparing in her gaze that suggested to him she did not waste regret on inevitabilities.

“Yes, I am the Baroness Adler,” she said, in answer to a question that had not occurred to him. “And that was my Kate. But who are you, and why are you here?”

At this, John walked round to the front of the couch and sat down, facing the Baroness squarely. “My name is John Watson, madam,” he said evenly, deliberately holding her eyes with his own. “I am the son of Harold Watson, and I am in the employ of the Benson and Sutcliff shipyard in Portsmouth. And I –” He stopped abruptly as he realized that this last, as well as anything else he might think to tell her, was perhaps to his disadvantage for her to know. After all, if his venture were to prove successful, he would cease to be those things, to be most of the things by which others knew him. He swallowed his heart back down and found a new ending for his sentence: “I am here to talk to you.”

The Baroness’s smile emerged in full force, and John dared to hope that he had made a favorable impression. “John Watson,” she said, as if tasting the syllables. “What foolish thing do you want from me?” She barely paused before continuing. “Of course it’s foolish, they all are. You can run away, of course, take up a new life, a new name, but the world is the same wherever you go.” She leaned back into the chair, changing the cross of her ankles. “But I can perhaps help you get hold of the thing you think you want.” She looked him straight in the eye once more, the smile still a shadow on her lips.

The words were simple, he could say them; he had said them to her, in his head, dozens of times. She had never had a face before, let alone one such as this, aristocratic bearing carved into its fine-boned lines like a riverbed carved from stone by the ancient and implacable passage of years. But, taking in these qualities of her face, he was reminded of another one. He squared his shoulders. “Madam, I would like to know whatever it is you can tell me about the scientist Holmes.” 

He had surprised her, he could tell, though he face remained carefully still. “Surely you didn’t come all this way for information.”

He kept his eyes level with hers, wondering how much of the truth to tell, wondering how much it was possible to speak truly of something he himself so little understood. “Not just information,” he said at last. “Madam.”

It was a different smile that rose to her lips this time; John could not read it. “You are cautious,” she said. “That is wise. I am happy to tell you what is public knowledge. The Holmes family estate lies to the north, near Manchester. Lord Mycroft Holmes is rarely there, however, being intimately involved in affairs of state; he is usually to be found in London. But I think you are asking about his younger brother, who fancies himself a naturalist.” John flinched slightly at the disdainful turn of phrase, and the Baroness did not miss it. 

“So,” she said, her voice now very soft. John felt his eyes drop.

“Sherlock Holmes quite detests the country, and prefers to be in London if at all possible,” she said. “But he also has little love for London society – which you’ll know if you’ve met him.” John’s eyes snapped back up, and saw at once that she knew very well what she was about. “So he can most reliably be found at Lord Holmes’s house, but he spends as much of the season as possible out of the city, haring off after some new bird or fish. And one never knows when that will be, of course. But that is where one should call, if one wishes to find him at home.”

The Baroness’s smile was by now quite coy. He felt his jaw clench and struggled to relax it. “You know I cannot – I cannot. On my own.” She leaned back again, still smiling, and John stilled the frustration inside of him, sensing in this moment a test. “But I want to— I want to know about his. His work. I want to aid him in his research.” He was warming to his point now. “I want to be there when he discovers, to, to help him change – things. I want –“ he fell silent, having stumbled beyond the reach of his own imaginings. It was too much, to try to see through the door just now opening to him and into the world beyond, it was too bright, it would blind him.

Baroness Adler watched him in silence, her face unreadable, all traces of mockery gone. “You certainly do,” she said at last, still studying his face intently. He realized he had spoken without due deference. 

“So the question, then, is how to put you in the way of associating with Holmes,” she said, frowning a bit with thought. “It’s not an easy problem that you’ve set me, John Watson.”

He nodded, heart in his throat.

“You realize that I cannot guarantee that he will actually _want_ to talk to you. In fact, I can nearly promise the opposite. He will be polite, but the man has very few friends.”

“I accept this, madam.” 

She regarded him thoughtfully for a moment. “Your people come from Scotland, do they not?”

“Yes, madam,” he replied; this much, he knew, anyone could read in his face. 

“I have cousins near Inverness,” she said, still thoughtful, as much to herself as to him. “Yes, it will have to be the Morays. Nobody would take you for French, certainly.” She threaded her fingers together and shuffled them absently. Silently, John thought to himself that he would have to remember to tell Harry that the rumors about the Baroness’s family connections on the continent were likely true. The thought of her expression, when he told her, made him smile just a bit. He would tell her the rest, too, of course. He closed his eyes, briefly, at the enormity of it, sitting here with the Baroness as she laid out a new frame for his future. When he opened them again he found the Baroness watching him.

“Can you hold your tongue?” she asked, somewhat abruptly.

John blinked in surprise. “I – I can keep a secret.”

“Well.” Baroness Adler made a complicated face. “I carry around a great many secrets, many of them,” and here her mouth quirked briefly, “other people’s. The secrets of powerful people are their own kind of power. Do you not find that to be true, John?”

John still felt out of his depth. “I’m not sure, madam.”

The Baroness made a noise of dismissal and carried onward. “I don’t entirely care for London society myself, so I like to make…. adjustments, where I can. I can, for example, make a request of Lord Holmes that he give lodging, for a time, to a young cousin of mine from Scotland, who is recovering from illness and requires the care of a specialist in London for the next several months.” John’s heart lifted suddenly, dizzily, as he began to taken in her meaning. 

“So I am to pose, as. As your cousin,” John managed. Saying it aloud only confirmed his sense that this was an utterly far-fetched design, and yet somehow fed his ridiculous sense of euphoria.

“ _Distant_ cousin,” the Baroness confirmed, smiling. “My great-grandmother’s sister married a member of the Garde Ecossaise. They relocated to Scotland some years later.” John couldn’t help raising his eyebrows. “It is an improbable world we live in. But yes, it is a plan that will require some” – she trailed off delicately – “concessions.”

“That is all right, madam,” John said, and it was – he had known, after all, that resolution for which he had dared hope would come at great cost. The thought of leaving his family behind, saying goodbye to Gran and to Harry, only seeing them perhaps once a year, continued to tug down the corners of his heart even as the rest soared high enough to practically lift him off the ground. Whatever it was that the Baroness asked him to do in exchange would be worth it, he would manage it. “But will it work? How can you be sure that Lord Holmes will agree to, to– “

“Mycroft Holmes is in my debt,” she replied, sparing them both John’s struggle to complete the thought. “There is no need to go into details, I think, but he will not have forgotten it. And I will… remind him that I rely on his discretion as he relies on mine.” She cocked an eyebrow at John. “So what do you think so far, John Watson?”

John felt himself crash back to earth. “I think that… that there is a lot I still don’t understand. About how this will work. How the deception will succeed. I confess that I am not sure how to sustain it.” But I trust you, he did not add. Because he did – her cleverness was evident, as well as her ability to manipulate – but those very reasons made him hesitate to confirm out loud how completely he was in her power.

The Baroness sighed. “Yes. This is the point at which it will rather depend on your strength of character.” She leaned forward, her gaze searingly intent, and John felt himself stripped to the bone under the force of it. “I asked if you could hold your tongue.”

John dipped his head, freshly aware of the gap between them. “You did, madam. And I assure you that I can keep your secrets.”

“Oh, you won’t have any to keep, other than your own,” the Baroness replied airily. “That is not my concern. And I don’t need another spy in the Holmes household.” Her voice sharpened beneath its silk-smooth surface. “No, this little experiment will be its own reward, I think. But.” She paused, drew breath; and John wondered, in a dim and detached corner of his mind, what task, what terror might be stern enough to make this formidable woman quail. “Your face will not give you away, and your manners are gracious enough. Your hands” – she flicked her eyes down in some distaste, as John reflexively folded them together in front of him, as though for protection – “are a problem, but a few weeks’ care will change that. We will keep you here a few weeks, while I return to London, and then I will send for you. But if you are to enter the Holmes household, you must,” and here her voice caught only briefly, “you must pledge to me that you will speak not a single word. At all.”

It had cost her no little effort to say it, but her eyes were unrelenting.

John was stunned; as though the very suggestion had already robbed him of his voice.

“We will call it a consequence of your illness,” she said.

John stared, and struggled to absorb. “You want – you wish that I might…. I am never to speak?” His voice shivered to nothing on the final word; he felt pressure on his throat, and realized that his hand had, quite unconsciously, risen to wrap around the base of his neck, as though in protection. Or perhaps to keep it in, to press it back into himself.

“I can furnish you with a gentleman’s wardrobe,” said the Baroness, “and I can help you remake your person, to an extent, until you more fully appear the part. But I cannot erase the sound of your past from your speech – I do not know how it could be done.” Her voice softened slightly. “It would destroy any history we might contrive.”

“But… I cannot write,” John protested. “How am I to, to communicate, to explain myself to….” 

She smiled slightly, and (John thought) sadly. “You say a great deal with your face. More than you realize, I think. And your Holmes will not be troubled overmuch. He wants nothing so much as an audience.”

Holmes. _Your Holmes,_ she had said. John closed his eyes.

She continued to speak quietly. “I have a chemist on retainer in London; he can provide you with a tincture that will deaden the feeling in your throat. It will not entirely prevent you from speaking, should you make the effort, but it may help to curb the impulse.” 

John nodded, his throat tight with unshed tears. It all made sense, a terrible iron-clad kind of sense… but oh, how hard, how very lonely it was going to be.

 _More lonely than you are now?_ came the thought.

Yes, he would do it. He felt decision settle in his stomach, into the muscles of his face, into his whole skeleton: a familiar sort of resolute calm that came on the far side of a hard decision. He opened his eyes and saw her standing, her face resolute, though still touched with sadness.

“There is one more thing,” she said, in a voice to match. John felt his jaw clench from sheer trepidation. He stood as well.

“This is a risk for me as well as for you,” she declared, “and I cannot have you running back to your old life the moment it becomes difficult.” She held up a hand to still his protest. “I do not question your valor, or your sincerity. But I am not so foolish as to proceed without insurance.

“Before I take you to London and make introductions, you will return to Portsmouth to pay a visit to your family. And you will explain to them that you are renouncing them for life in London and do not wish to see them again.”

John’s legs faltered beneath him, and he half-sat, half collapsed back onto the couch, which had not half an hour ago had seemed stiff and imposing, and was now the closest thing he had to refuge. John had heard the turn of phrase about knees going weak, but had always taken it for a mere expression: only words. It was a strange echo of memory, a grey throb amid the vivid pain of the losses he was squaring himself to absorb, and those he was being asked to inflict. And he thought dully that never again would he make that mistake of dismissing words as _merely_ anything; they were the measure of all the doing and undoing he could see ahead of him, and the enormity of it nearly overwhelmed him. 

His entire body fought it, but he could not hold back a few dry sobs. They were over long before his grief was spent, but he kept his head buried in his hands, too full of dread even to think of the names or faces of those to whom he must soon be so cruel, and whom he must learn to live without.

After a moment, he felt a hand on his shoulder; looking up, he saw the Baroness above him, her face both stern and, for once, unguardedly sad.

“I did say it was foolish,” she said quietly.

John drew in a deep, steadying breath, and squeezed his eyes shut briefly. Standing, he pursed his lips and reached deep into the core of himself – into the dark hollow in his chest where he kept his deepest hopes – and drew out the strength to give a curt nod, affirming the decision he had, after all, already made.

“I agree to your terms,” he said. “I will do it.”

She studied his face for a moment, and then nodded once. He nodded in return. And this, said the painful clench of his heart, was the real agreement, the moment his new life began, spoken in the only language he would have.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am of course always delighted by comments (or kudos, if you're feeling'em) but I would especially love to hear, at this juncture in particular, from those of y'all who have stuck with the story this long. 
> 
> \-----
> 
> * Portsbridge Creek was kept clear to serve as a shipping lane until the early 1860s, when it was deemed to be not worth the trouble. Within a few years, the reeds had indeed clogged it so thoroughly that it was possible to walk from one bank to the other for a couple of hours every day. (Lte afternoon is just a guess on my part, though.) The steel bridge was built in 1869.
> 
> * The Garde Ecossaise was a regiment comprised of Scottish nobles that served the King of France during the late Middle Ages as part of a cooperative agreement between the two countries as part of the Auld Alliance against England. By the time of this story, the Garde has long since ceased to exist in any sense (though it was not formally disbanded until 1791, and briefly reinstated in the early part of the 19th century) and most of its members were given land, and naturalized as French citizens, long before that. But the blood tie, however old, is not actually so improbable; and to have had a relative relocate to Scotland does seem like just the right touch of colorful scandal in Irene's background, thinks me.
> 
> * I have (re)named the Adler family estate in an oblique allusion to a really wonderful novel that is set, like the estate itself, in the Hampshire Downs. and I will be very excited if you know what it is.
> 
> * now that I have permission, I want to give a shoutout to achray's really extraordinary fic "All We Ought To Ask", a now-nearly-finished Victorian AU that was percolating in the background when I was laying out the conceptual structure for this story. It's a marvelous read in any case, and I suspect that it has left traces on this story of mine far beyond the general historical setting. I can't HTML for shit, but it's here:  
> http://archiveofourown.org/works/868705/chapters/1667601


	5. London, Part I: Westminster

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh man, I am so sorry about how long this took. But it's also.... long? About a third of what was supposed to be in this chapter got pushed off into the next, which means a) that chapter is partly written and b) it will be shorter (and faster in the production!) than this one. 
> 
> patternofdefiance has always been an excellent beta, but this time around, she went above and beyond: not only excellent advice on the text, but also pep-talking and hand-holding, served with a side of neurological background that I had not counted on needing. I am so grateful to her.

The John Watson who boarded the train at Bishopstoke with a first class ticket for London was not the same young man who had come to Sandleford three weeks earlier. John Watson had come in a workman’s jacket and boots, and had the shoulders and hands of a man who labored all day bending timber, and a ready enough smile although he kept his counsel, and would speak when spoken to in an earnest, pleasant voice.

This man was no longer John Watson, and he did not smile.

John had passed his first night at Sandleford in something of a trance, as though the embrace of his future prospects had forcibly unmoored him from the present. He had taken his dinner in the kitchen with the household staff; it was food unlike any he was used to eating, garnishes and sauces and strange flavors, and though the plate was clearly for their especial use, it was still fine enough to make him nervous about breaking it. The five others who sat at the unfinished wooden table with him were agreeable company, and after initial pleasantries they left him to tend his own thoughts undisturbed. He was grateful for this small kindness; it took some concentration simply to navigate the unfamiliar food. Nobody asked him where he had come from or why he was among them, and John could not escape the oddly unsettling sense that somehow, they already knew why he was here, and could see through him to those he had betrayed. 

But when he had awoken the next morning, stretched out on a disconcertingly soft bed in a room larger than his family’s house, the sense of unreality that had hung like a veil between him and the world had been gone. For just a moment, he had squeezed his eyes shut and let himself sink into that deep bank of pillows, as though they could swallow him up, be a bulwark against the world. Then he had gotten out of bed and begun the work of erasing himself.

Now, as the train jostled to life beneath him, John realized that – for the moment at least – this small but neat little compartment, upholstered in dark red and finished with trims of polished wood, was his alone. He found himself reveling in the almost obscene luxury of that privacy, even as he felt faintly ashamed. Three weeks of royal treatment at Sandleford had not entirely done away with his awareness of the grubbier, more crowded world most people still lived in. 

There had been new clothes, of course; a few garments more or less his size, to hold him until he could retrieve the pieces made to his size, from measurements sent ahead to London. There been the riding lessons from the master of stables, so that he should not embarrass himself if ever he were called upon to travel by horseback. And though the Baroness herself had returned to London before John could lay eyes on her again, Kate (whom he gathered was rarely apart from her mistress) had stayed behind to help school him in those finer points of table etiquette. And every evening, he had sat at the vanity table in that cavernous bedroom as Josephine the housemaid had rubbed a thick cream over his hands and then wrapped them in warm towels.

His hands: soft and uncallused, now. He found himself nervously stroking one finger along the paper ticket that had been handed him, stamped with words he could not read. It looked foreign even between the fingers of that new and strangely sensitive hand, in a sleeve of finer fabric than he had ever touched until a short while ago: a concrete scrap of the new world that lay ahead. He studied the lines of text stamped on the pasteboard, wondering which of the words was the name of his home. Or, rather, his former home.

There had been the final trip to Portsmouth, the last visit to his family. John hadn’t known whether he was putting it off out of fear or from the wish that hearing their voices and seeing their faces for the final time might still be ahead of him. The Baroness had left orders that he be given the use of her carriage for the journey, but John had walked. After only a few days in muslin, the cheap broadcloth of his old clothing had felt unpleasantly coarse against his skin. And when he had drawn close, had felt again the familiar cobbles beneath his feet and saw again the familiar door set slightly askew in its frame… 

He felt a sudden lance of pain in his hand, and as he came back to the present – the slight jostling of the train car, the murmur of conversations in the hallway – and looked down to discover that his fingernails had pressed red crescents into his palm, two of them to the point of bleeding. He swallowed and gathered up his self-possession. It would not do to wear his grief so nakedly on his face. 

At least he would be relieved of the responsibility of making conversation, should a stranger enter his compartment. The Baroness had not given him a mandate about when he must cease to speak, requiring only that he keep silent once he had entered the sphere in which it was possible he might encounter some-one who would later be part of his circle of acquaintance in London. But he was not worried, even though he had crossed that threshold only moments before. He had thrown away his old clothes, more than two weeks before, upon his return from Portsmouth; and his directions to the cook, that she burn them, were the last words he had spoken. 

John squared his shoulders, then hastily dropped them – for that was John’s gesture, and it did not belong to James Lindsay. James sat straighter, and would not fret so. He stared out the window and struggled to set aside the memories of a life that had never belonged to him. 

\----  
Evening had fallen by the time the train pulled into Victoria station. He spent several minutes in the lowering dusk on the rapidly-emptying platform trying to keep his head about him when he spotted a servant wearing the livery of Baron Adler’s house, who nodded at him and led him outside, where several hansom-cabs were drawn up at the kerb. 

John stared out the window at the tumultuous clatter of London as it rolled by, and could not help thinking that it was, in many respects, not so different than Portsmouth, or at least the grander districts. He tried to mark the turns in his head, but gave it up after only a few turns, hopelessly confused when the grander structures did not give way, as he had expected, to smaller or less ornate buildings. Another fifteen minutes’ travel took them to what might have at last been the edge of the finest neighborhood, and after the servant paid the cabbie, they went upstairs. After the servant had left him, John made his solitary dinner from a plate of cold meats had been laid out for him on the side-table and collapsed on the bed, barely taking the time to remove his shoes and outer-clothes.

Thus John passed his first night in London in the Baron Adler’s house on Marylebone Road, and he saw neither of his noble hosts until shortly before he departed. The following afternoon, after a lavish but solitary midday meal, John followed a servant down to the drawing room, where the Baroness rose from a couch to greet him, practically glowing. She was dressed in a shade of blue that reminded him of her sitting-room at Sandleford; silk, he could now tell by looking. He could not take his eyes off of her.

“James,” she said, warmly, her eye contact almost too firm. John swallowed and nodded. She smiled and held out her hands to him. “You are well?” she asked, as he crossed the room to take them, and bent to brush her fingers with his lips. 

“It is nearly time to go,” said the Baroness. “Your trunk has already been loaded into the carriage, and Lord Holmes sent word yesterday that your apartment in his house stands ready to receive you.” She lowered her voice slightly. “I trust Roberts gave you the preparation for your, ah, condition yesterday evening.” John nodded again, and then, without premeditation, found his hand at his pocket, pressing fingertips to cloth to feel the small vial tucked within. The oily liquid, of which he had been instructed to decant a few drops onto the back of his tongue, had been nearly tasteless, but had made him cough, and had left his throat feeling parched and prickled. The mild but persistent discomfort would not, he thought, prevent him from uttering a sound if he were to set his mind on it, but it would serve as a good reminder.

“He knows nothing of our designs, by the way,” she continued, her voice dropping to a still more intimate register – and _this_ ,John sensed, this complex deception was the cause of the bright kernel of energy that had so lit up her countenance – “but only what I have put about more generally, about a Scottish cousin whose ability to speak or write has vanished while in the grip of a recent fever. He knows to take you once a week to the neurologist near the Euston Road.” 

John realized – again, as though it was new – that it didn’t matter that he knew not what to say, and simply nodded.

“Even if Lord Holmes suspects me of some intrigue, he will hold his tongue and try to ascertain my designs. Which he shall not do, I think.” She smiled, and though it may have been intended for a comfort, it felt like a cold finger against his heart, even as it beat too large and too hot in his chest. “For your part, you must be careful to sustain the impression that you are convalescent; and as for your voice, you would do well to give the impression of some distress or frustration at being unable to speak. I have taken care that they shall think of your ongoing condition as a kind of neurasthenia, so that the enterprising Mister Holmes will not take it upon himself to try to cure you.”

The Baroness smiled again, more gently. “But that is a long-term precaution; for the moment, I doubt the younger Holmes will bother to take notice of the fact that you are arriving. But I trust you will make your way into his attentions nonetheless.” 

Burnside, the butler, chose exactly that moment to appear in the doorway, wearing an expression that suggested he had need of the Baroness’s attention; and as she turned away, John hoped his face did not reveal the slight quailing of heart that he felt, at these words. As she bent her head to Burnside’s, John granted himself a moment to stare that fear in the face, the fear that Holmes would choose to remain aloof even after all that John had sacrificed to be near him. He closed his eyes, and in a rush saw not Holmes’s face but Harry’s, her hand to her mouth, the desperate denial in her eyes like a knife in his heart.

“James.” The Baroness’s voice was, again, very near; he opened his eyes at the sound a full few seconds before he recalled that this was now his name. 

She offered him her arm. “Let us proceed, then, to your new home.”

\---

Lord Holmes received them not in a sitting room but in a dimly lit library, which felt at first intimate and close but which spiraled out in strange nooks and alcoves. And thick with books: floor-to-ceiling shelves like these were something of which John had heard, but no more expected to see in his own lifetime than Queen Victoria, or perhaps a dragon. In between the stands of shelf, the wall was hung with portraits in heavy oils, interspersed with much smaller frames, containing delicate colors John could not at first make out. And in the middle of the room, Lord Holmes stood between a pair of enormous red armchairs that commanded the small lobby, watching shrewd and impassive as the Baroness presented John, nodding his head in response to John’s bow. John would not have known him, at the first, for any relation of his brother’s, this long-nosed man with hair already thinning even though he looked to be in his early thirties. But when John at last raised his eyes to Lord Holmes’s, he felt in the penetrating stare that met them something akin to the searching intelligence of which he had caught so brief a glimpse. 

And then, a flicker of movement from the far corner of the room. There was a curve of shelf that protruded more deeply into the room than John had realized, but he became aware of it now as Sherlock Holmes stepped out from behind it, pacing, with his eyes trained on the book in his hand. John kept his eyes fixed on Lord Holmes, but he could not help taking in the tousled black hair, the pen-and-ink lines of elegance; nor could he prevent the slight catch of breath in his throat at the sight. Beneath the layer of numbness from the herbal tincture he had swallowed for the first time that morning, beneath the weeks of self-imposed silence that made his vocal cords feel alien in his throat, there arose an involuntary freezing. He felt the Baroness glance at him, very briefly, and then away.

But fortunately Lord Holmes had turned at his brother’s approach. “Sherlock,” he said, his tone reproving. “Come be introduced to Mr. Lindsay.” 

“I don’t think so, Mycroft,” Sherlock replied. Setting his book down on a nearby table, he picked up a small calfskin notebook and the pencil that lay beside it and jotted a few notes. “You – instructed – me to be here – for his arrival,” he said, writing all the while, seemingly careless of the fact that they all waited on his progress. “And here I am,” he said, at last looking up at his brother with a cool contempt. “Your terms have been met, and I will be detained no longer.” 

“ _Sherlock_ ,” snapped Lord Holmes, the name an admonition. But the younger Holmes went on as is he hadn’t heard, except to raise his own voice a notch as he tossed the notebook to the table with what was surely a self-conscious flourish: “Royal Asiatic Society, lecture on the flowering plants of the Ceylon, first findings, so unless you have something _interesting_ ….” Swift strides had taken him to the door by this point, and the clicking of his heels on the polished floor of the foyer had already begun to fade before John quite realized he was gone. He had not looked at John once.

Lord Holmes met his eyes with an unreadable gaze and offered a regretful smile. “I apologize for my brother’s rudeness. I assure you, whatever venom you may have sensed just now—” and here his smile turned slightly sour “—is directed wholly at me. No doubt you will meet him properly in good time. For the present, however, the housemaid has made arrangements for you in one of the upstairs bedrooms, I believe. Willis –” he raised his eyebrows over John’s shoulder, and a young woman in a black uniform appeared at John’s elbow and nodded to him. John smiled and turned back to Lord Holmes, who met him impassively.

“I’m sure you would very much like to see your rooms,” he said, a faint hint of what might have been impatience threading through his tone, as though the suggestion was already somehow taxing his reserves. “We dine rather early here; I will send someone for you at six-thirty.” John realized that he was being dismissed, and as he turned to the maid, Lord Holmes had already looked back over to the Baroness. He gave Willis a cautious smile, unsure of how precisely he ought to treat the serving staff; to his relief, her answering smile was pleasant but distant.

“You will stay a few minutes, madam,” John heard Lord Holmes say as he followed Willis out the double doors to the library. The wide, bright hallway ate up the sound that might have passed through the doors behind them, and John forgot their conversation as he looked about him at the cold stone grandeur of a marble-floored foyer. She led him up an alarmingly grand staircase, and down the hall to a door on the right. John barely had time to wonder what rooms might lie behind the other doors before stepping into his own and feeling himself flush with delight. It was far humbler and sweeter than he ever would have guessed from the stateliness of the other rooms: perhaps half the size of the room he had occupied at Sandleford, but cozily furnished and lit by large north-facing windows. The windows were open – perhaps to chase away the mustiness of a room often disused – and a small fire had been laid in the grate despite the season. It was a place that might really, someday, feel like home.

The maid bobbed her head and withdrew, pulling the door closed behind her. John noticed that his trunk had been set discreetly near the door. Opening it, he felt at once slightly less at home; these new clothes, although cut to precisely his size, suited him less well than this new bedroom. And yet they were his, they were _him_ , for they had belonged to James Lindsay even in Inverness, or had at least been made to resemble the clothing that might have been burned after his sickness. He took up a jacket and stared at it, idly rubbing at the fabric between two fingers and trying to think it into his past, into feeling familiar; until, abandoning the task, he hung it in the wardrobe that stood against the near wall. He had transferred nearly all of the clothing in this fashion before he realized his error. He stood a moment, chiding himself for the slip back into old ways, but hadn’t quite the heart to replace it all in the trunk. He would, he thought, simply have to get better at emulating the natural rhythms of this new existence.

A clatter of noise from the street drew him to the window. Looking down, John saw the Adler carriage pulling away from the kerb. Watching it blend into the flow of traps and hansoms, he felt his throat close briefly as another layer of certainty settled over his new life: the same paralyzing clutch he had felt the last time he had tried to speak, tried to apologize, tried to explain without explaining. He had been permitted to speak, then, but still hadn’t been able to, because he had had no words to give that would have stopped his Gran from crying, taken the sting out of his father’s eyes. Harry had pleaded with him to stop, but he couldn’t, it was already too late—

John’s side hurt, suddenly, where it had struck the armrest of the large stuffed chair by the window; he had been so caught up in his thoughts that he had forgotten himself, had all but collapsed while in the transports of memory. John shook his head sharply to clear it, tried to calm his breathing, cast about for some other thing to distract him. He needed to compose himself before he again appeared in company, and he had no sense of how much time had elapsed, how soon he would be expected to see Lord Holmes, to see – but no, he could not think of that yet. John went to the washstand and splashed his face and neck with water from the pitcher; then he pressed a hand to his side, as if it could contain all the aches in his ribs, and retreated to the chair by the window to sit quietly until he was called.

\---

To John’s great disappointment and minor relief, the younger Holmes was not at dinner, though the elder assured him that he had wished it otherwise. “Do not take it to heart, James,” Lord Holmes had said. “It is only to flout my wishes, not out of any disrespect to you in particular.” He had then bestowed upon John a regretful smile and turned to the secretary who was seated beside him, and proceeded to converse with him in low tones all throughout the meal, which John ate glumly enough, though it was all excellently cooked.

After the last plates were cleared, and John and Lord Holmes had both refused port, Willis appeared again at John’s elbow and offered to guide him to the parlor. Lord Holmes remained absorbed in conversation, so John assented, wishing at least to know more of the house. It was pretty and spacious, and contained a gaming-table and a pianoforte as well as several wing chairs and a few small tables. An elaborate flower arrangement took up part of the center table, crisp and white and lush, and John wondered who might have sent it, since it was obvious that none in the household had produced it. He recalled, then, how Harry had been nearly mad with delight to see the flowers come out on Portsdown Hill every spring. Small and humble things they were, those tiny yellow flowers, compared to this serene and stately display. He felt a crevice of warmth open in his heart as he imagined her here, and remembered only in the next second why that was such a bad idea. But it was too late, Harry was there again, he could not shut her out fast enough: that same beaming smile, the morning of his departure for Sandleford, eyes flashing at him behind their father’s back as John gathered himself for the trip. But she had not smiled that on last day, at their final meeting, though she had tried: “You have had your joke, John,” she had said, “so please now stop, stop…” 

He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, digging his fingertips into his head until they hurt, and tried to squeeze the memory back down. At last he felt himself calming, and could lower his hands, open his eyes. Fortunately, nobody had come in. John turned his back on the flowers and set himself the task of inspecting the rest of the room.

Though clean and well-kept, the parlor was not entirely orderly: the accoutrements of projects in progress lay spread out on various surfaces here as they had been in the library. After a wary glance at the door, John bent over the stack of papers on a small writing-desk in one corner. They seemed mostly to be tables of numbers, and though he could read these – for he and Harry had both learned their numbers, helping their father keep track of his small trades with other workmen in the shipyard – they held little interest for him. 

He then spotted a small notebook bound in calfskin, similar to the one the younger Holmes had been writing in earlier in the library, lying on a small table next to one of the great chairs by the fireplace. Flipping through it, he saw many pages of notes in spidery handwriting, made on what appeared to be several occasions; some were in pencil and some in ink, and the entries varied in length from pages to only a few lines. He brushed his fingers along the text and then quite abruptly set it down, this oddly private object only one more reminder that its author was, maddeningly, just beyond his reach. Looking about the room for some other possible pursuit – books he could not read, a stack of playing cards, papers, an instrument he could not play, the fragrant display on the central table he could not even bear to look at – he realized, in a slow creep, that he was deeply exhausted, worn out by the many transformations of the day. Making his mental apologies to the empty room (which, he suspected, as often as not stood empty), he retreated to his own chamber and readied himself for bed, where – tired though he was – he stared at the ceiling for a great length of time before succumbing to a deep and dreamless sleep.

\---

John breakfasted alone, and found it rather less alarming than in Lord Holmes’s presence, although his discomfort in dealing with the house-servants only sharpened, it seemed, with no one else to bear the brunt of the distinction. But he was grateful, all the same, for the chance to eat in relative privacy. Shortly before going down to breakfast, he had taken another dose of the tincture which Baroness Adler had given him, and discovered that it all but prevented him from swallowing for nearly twenty minutes, when the buzzing sensation it had caused began to ease. When he had at last finished his cold porridge, however, his solitary sojourn in the dining room dwindled in comparison with the long and empty stretch of the day before him, With Lord Holmes no doubt sequestered and little interested in talking to him, and his younger brother also missing from the scene, John had no notion of how to keep himself from idleness.

Well. He stepped into the hall and paused to think, determined to master the floor plan of the house. It required a few more pauses along the way, but a few moments later he found that he had retraced his steps to the foyer. Pleasure at this small success brightened his spirits, and he glanced at the door to the library, no longer propped open as it had been yesterday, but also not so forbidding as it had seemed when he passed it on his way to breakfast this morning. His curiosity prickled as he remembered how he had desired, in that first undistracted instant, to explore the room more fully, and particularly to inspect the artworks on the walls more closely. The books may have been out of his reach, but the paintings at least were open to him. He slipped quietly across the foyer and pushed gently on the door, peering in. It was empty, and John released a breath he hadn’t known he was holding at not finding the person he had both hoped and dreaded to see.

Though empty, the air in the library felt thick with unspoken words. Drawing a deep, slow breath, he looked around him, drinking in all the rich details of the room, all the years that had nourished it. The shelves were not entirely full, but the open books spread out upon the two reading-tables, and the stacks of books on and beside them, gave the open lengths of shelving rather the look of a living collection, individual books moving from shelf to hand to table as they became useful each in turn, its riches of ideas being breathed in and out. John shivered. Even being in the room filled him with a kind of quiet elation. He wondered whether he could find enough quiet afternoons to perhaps teach himself to read.

John walked slowly to the nearest portrait, trailing his hand as he went along the spines of the books that sat at waist-height. The portrait hung on a stretch of wall painted a deep, heavy red, in an ornate frame covered in gold leaf, and beneath it were two of the smaller pictures that had caught his eye at the first. The portrait showed, from the waist up, a gentleman dressed in a rather severe black suit; and though the man’s face was rather an ungainly collection of features, John’s heart skipped a beat when he took in the man’s striking cheekbones. Hastily he dropped his eyes to the smaller pictures below, and discovered that they were not paintings but sketches, botanical drawings. The one on the left contained a complicated leaf, shown from three different angles, and the one on the right a spray of red berries on a long stem with heart-like leaves. John leaned in closer, drawn in by the fine detail of the drawings. The stylized shadow of the plants was rendered in careful cross-hatching, each stroke delicate and precise; the lines that comprised the plants themselves disappeared into living stems, leaves, sunlit gleams.

“My great-uncle Vernet’s work. Rather fanciful, but certainly well-rendered; he was a skilled draughtsman.” John’s heart dropped into his stomach as he started and turned. The younger Holmes, the elegant scientist – _his_ Holmes, he thought, with only a mild flicker of shame – was leaning against the far reading-table. John had no idea when the other man had come in – nor, he realized, how long he himself had been absorbed in looking at the drawings – but he wondered how he had not felt it right away, felt the change in the air of the room, the shift in the balance of the idea-heavy silence. He could feel it now, certainly: without the elder Holmes and the Baroness between them to thin the air, the physical reality of his presence after months of closely-treasured remembrances that John had guarded and protected like a flower in frost was almost shocking. John stared and stared, helpless, drinking him in. Even as he felt a stir of irritation at the man’s detached and condescending tone – after all, what had he done, that Holmes should sound already bored of him, that he had not even a glance to spare him? – he was captivated.

Holmes, meanwhile, kept his gaze trained downward, on the book in his hand, continuing in that same disaffected monotone, “his portrait is on the far wall, by the way; that is my grandfather’s portrait, just above.” His eyes still on his book, Holmes huffed disdainfully. “Not much to say for yourself, I see. But then that’s rather –” his words trailed off abruptly as he swept his eyes upward and then stopped as they met John’s. For a full minute he gazed intently at John as if utterly arrested, his entire face gone electric in a way John could not quite read. For a moment they both stared, the silence between them stretching heavy even in the heavy air of that room, as John tacked between terror and wild hope that the man had recognized him, remembered him. 

“Excuse me,” Holmes said at last, his voice soft and rough and almost gentle in tone. “But I…..“ Then Holmes’s lower lip pushed up in a mulish frown, and he gave his head a quick, sharp shake. When his eyes opened, his expression was composed and utterly opaque.

“Sherlock Holmes,” he said, voice once more pitched low and even. He set the book down on the reading-table and crossed the library in long strides. John held out his hand, but Holmes drew up short a few feet in front of him and simply looked. “And you – are – our – Scotsman,” he said, peering down into John’s face with eyes like the sea under high summer clouds. It felt at once impersonal and almost invasive, as if Holmes had reached over and was reading his character in the bumps and planes of his head. 

A small line appeared between Holmes’s brows. “You are not what I expected,” he said at last. “I had thought we were to be playing host to someone sickly or fretful, or otherwise displeasing to the sensibilities of your lady cousin.” A trace of a sneer came into his voice as he said this last. But it was gone as he continued: “Homely, perhaps. But you are – inclined to hard work, you carry it in your form, yet careful of your hands, which are soft. An artist, then, of some kind, perhaps even a musician. Perhaps it is not so strange a pursuit, for a gentleman, where you are from; or perhaps you don’t care. You spend a great deal of time in the sun, or at least you used to before you were ill: a real enthusiast for the outdoors, you must be, to see so much sunlight as far north as you are, even though Inverness has rather a dry climate. But the cut of your clothing is suggestive of indoor pursuits, theater and parlor games; so either you expect a very different life while in town, or your clothing was chosen for you, you were sick, and the old things tucked away, no, more likely burned. But who would stand in so intimate a connexion with you as to be in a position to order your clothing, and yet not know your temperament? So you _are_ interested in social pursuits, even though” – and here Holmes trailed off quite slowly – “you… cannot… talk.” He let out a small huff, which John first took for anger and then realized was, strangely, excitement. 

He had stepped quite close, and in the moment directly following John felt that huff of breath against his cheek. 

Dumbfounded by the breadth of what Holmes had taken in, John could only nod – for Holmes was right about all of the details (other than the fashion of his clothing, about which John could have no opinion) even if the explanation he ascribed was all wrong, having been defeated by the false history the Baroness had composed for him. Or was it even wrong? John had spent the last day feeling exquisitely ill-matched to his surroundings, a confusing jumble of drilled-in manners and hastily schooled expectations blended with a newer, more somber version of the person he had always been. He had taken this risk, this absurd leap into a world utterly remote, because he had felt so ill at ease in his own; but it had not been enough to make him into a man who could move at his ease through this world, who could not only crave it from afar but inhabit it as his own. If this is what Sherlock Holmes saw when he looked at John, perhaps this person Holmes saw was the version of himself who could live here. And if it was not quite yet a version of himself, perhaps with time he would grow into the person he appeared to be.

For the first time, recalling the grueling self-transformation he had undergone brought John no pain, but only a stab of elation— for it had worked. He was here, in London, and Sherlock Holmes was looking at him like he was the most fascinating thing in the world. He felt a smile, a genuine one, break open his face for what felt like the first time in weeks.

But in the next moment the elation was gone, replaced by fear. If Sherlock could see all this so quickly, surely he would see through the carefully layered deception the Baroness had crafted. He could, perhaps, become the person Sherlock had just described.... but not yet, not so quickly. He felt a creeping edge of panic. He was not ready yet. John’s eyes met Sherlock’s once more, and it was just as he had remembered from that one brief shared glance by the riverbank; it was what he had longed for all these months; and he could not endure it. He needed time to absorb what Sherlock had said, and he had been knocked off-balance – he would give himself away, he felt certain, if he were to remain under that quicksilver gaze any longer. Dropping his eyes, he gave a swift bow – remembering barely in time to bend from the waist rather than bob his head – and moved swiftly out from under that steady stare. Out of the library he went, sliding along the book-lined wall, into the cold and open marble foyer, and up the grand staircase to his blessedly cozy room, and at last John could breathe again. 

He splashed his face with water from the pitcher on the washstand and seated himself, once again, in the chair by the window. From here he could hear the noises of the street, and if he turned his head to the left, the steady movement of traffic down the road on which they lived – John did not yet know its name. He watched the steady swell of carriage-traffic, surging into his sightline on one side, ebbing away in the distance on the other. It reminded him of the sea, so long as he remembered that everything was different.

\---- 

John remained in his room through the midday meal, promising himself as he let the time slide by that he would make it to supper. It had been a difficult afternoon. With leisure enough to meditate on his loneliness, John could not help thinking back to the things he had tried to shut out of his mind: how Harry would read his countenance and put an arm around his shoulder, his sadness long familiar to her even if she didn’t understand it; and his gran’s face, now netted with wrinkles, now smoothed by his memory’s reach into a more distant past, but always that same gentle crease at her eyes as her expression told him that she saw him all the way down. They were not what he had wanted most, but he had had them, and now he did not. He had lain on his bed, fully clothed, and let the tears run silent down his face.

But presently his grief had spent itself, and in the chamber of his heart out of which it had bled, he discovered in its place a sort of quiet acceptance. Feeling calmer, John sat up. Shifting shadows coming in through the windows led him to conclude that it was perhaps mid-afternoon, and John discovered that he could not bear to stay in that room any longer. Pulling the door shut behind him, he considered the possibility of returning to the library, and rejected it at once, in spite of the shame and remorse he now felt at the thought of his earlier conduct. Although his own earlier confusion and discomfiture had melted away, he could not expect the same of Holmes. The scientist might not put much stock in conventional politeness – indeed, his speech to John had proven that – but surely he would have been displeased that John had retreated in the face of his interest, however disconcerting it had been. It had seemed to John, even in their few very brief encounters, that Holmes was of a somewhat impatient and inflexible temper; he had no doubt been nettled by John’s untimely retreat. Better to meet again later, when Holmes will have had time to be distracted by some new project, and in a setting that would not call his earlier rudeness to mind. 

So John found his way back to the parlor. He stood a moment in the doorway, and made himself stare at the flower arrangement. But his grief had well and truly exhausted itself; on the far side of that river of tears, they were only flowers. Deliberately ignoring the small calfskin notebook that tugged at the edge of his attention, he passed the better part of an hour playing Patience, which Burnside had done his best to teach him in the kitchen at Sandleford, in the odd moments between dinner upstairs and their own. But the game lost its interest, once the challenge of fixing the rules in his mind had passed, and he found himself again pacing the room. The delicate blooms, he noticed, had faded a bit since the night before. He drew closer, and the sweet damp scent pulled him in, until he was up close and could detect a high, rich thrum of rot unfurling underneath the fresh perfume of the blooms still at their height. It struck him as a bit sad, that this elaborate creation, spilling over with what he could only imagine to be costly flowers, should both flourish and wither with nobody to take notice. He reached out gingerly to stroke a petal. It dropped silently off its bloom at his touch, and he startled back, pierced by a brief but intense pang of guilt. A few grains of yellow pollen followed the petal down, and he leaned in, fascinated. 

John had seen flowers, of course; but the combination of stillness and quiet and leisure, and this lush and decadent stand at the center of it, soaking him in heady sweetness, was something new. The balance of the fragrance shifted, shading riper and darker, as he bent closer to the low urn in which the stems were tucked. The way that the fallen petal took the shadows was less like cloth than he had expected, more like a plane of soft fine sand; it felt, under his tentative fingers, like the skin on the throat of the only girl he had ever kissed, at once welcoming and resistant to the tentative drag of his fingers. His breath stirred a papery green spray of leaves that curled between the white blooms. Carefully, he reached out and pinched one of the leaves between his fingers, where it rubbed and crackled but held as the petal had not done. He released it and the stem sprang back causing the entire edifice to quiver minutely. A moment later it was again still and serene, a graceful array of curves and lines and light.

John looked at the clock on the mantel-piece – dinner was at least an hour away. He would, he thought, be undisturbed. He fetched the calfskin notebook from where it lay on the pianoforte, along with its pencil, and carried it back over to the flower arrangement. He flipped to the back where the pages were still blank and, working carefully, he tore out the last sheet of paper, right along the spine. Then he took up the pencil.

The first few strokes were wrong, and he rubbed at them uselessly with his finger, and then scratched, and then gave up and flipped the sheet over. But he took the next attempt more slowly, and it went better: a single blossom, crisp and star-like with soft edges, began to take shape under his pencil. He went a bit far with the shading, but was able to rescue it by studying another flower, further up the side, which sat at a different angle on its slender neck. Next he tried a green spray, not the one he had touched but another more withered, its green edges crisping into pale brown and crumpling inward. A single blossom, deeper in, peeped out from the shadowy interior of the arrangement, and when he had got the greenery to his liking he began to trace out that deeper flower, working with the duller side of the pencil’s tip to capture the hum of that blaze of white, dimmed by green shadow.

“Sir?” The soft sound of the maid’s voice startled him bolt upright, snapping the tip of the pencil as he went. Gathering himself, he nodded acknowledgement and straightened his collar with one hand, while with the other he stealthily slid the notebook on top of his page of drawings, where it would escape notice until the notebook itself was moved. He would come back for it later.

\----

John was alone again for dinner – the elder Holmes was closeted with advisers, and the younger apparently skipped meals as it suited him – and John resigned himself to another long evening of solitude. He regretted, now, that he had not been able to endure Sherlock Holmes’s interest while he actually held it, for now it seemed that he might easily go several days without the opportunity even to see him, let alone to engage his attention.

It was as though, with this thought, John had stepped out from the mouth of some hallway into an enormous chamber, and lifted his lamp for the first time to take in its cavernous reaches – or to take in, rather, the fact that they lay beyond his sight. He had been measuring his life in minutes, or at most hours, hoping and planning and enduring in tiny increments. But sitting alone at the long, polished table in the dining room, he contemplated for the first time the fact that the next weeks and months would play out on this same stage; the rest of his life might be very well spent in this house. The feeling left an uncomfortable vacancy in his stomach, and he turned back to the portion left on his plate (somebody in the kitchen had evidently decided that he was in need of extra nourishment while recovering from his “illness”, and sent him out servings that were beyond even his considerable powers) as though it could offer the kind of fortification he needed. A different sort of loneliness was threatening, now: not the acute sense of loss, or fear, or longing for the particular company of Sherlock Holmes, but a dull-grey spread of future that rolled in like fog and coated everything in dreariness until even the most familiar monuments were at last erased from sight. 

It was in this state of mind that he returned to the parlor, hoping only for a shred of the steady calm he had felt earlier in the day, not expecting to find Sherlock Holmes already seated in a chair by the fire, his attention buried in a book. He glanced up at John’s entrance, and then quickly back down. It was not a gesture that invited company. But John had resolved that he would not let another opportunity pass him by, and so he seated himself in the companion chair.

“James. I had not thought we would be seeing you here,” said Holmes, a touch of a sneer in his voice. He had been expecting John to avoid him, John now realized. It was, he thought, a fair conclusion to have drawn, and yet so profoundly wrong – so absolutely backwards – that the misunderstanding suddenly struck him as funny, and he chuckled. It was little more than a silent huff of air, but Holmes’s eyes snapped up, cold and just a touch defensive. John caught them, held them, and tugged deliberately at his waistcoat, which earlier had spoken such volumes to the other man. Holmes’s face flickered in recognition, and John raised his eyebrows.

Across the young scientist’s face there briefly passed an expression that might have been a smile; in any case, the pleasure in his eyes was unmistakable. “Yet here you are,” he said, softly. He looked back up at John’s face, intently, as if searching. “Most people – do not appreciate it when I air my observations,” he said, and his face was somber again, guarded. John gave him a soft smile. It had been absolutely extraordinary, to see Holmes’s observational powers at work, and it grieved him to learn that such compelling displays were so poorly received. He shook his head, and pressed his lips together to keep in the warm words he could not say.

Holmes seemed to understand his sentiments, however, and the smile returned, small and shy. Immediately John wished he had some object, some memento, something else he could offer up to Holmes’s deductive powers, even though he knew what a terrible gamble it would be to invite Holmes to scrutinize his life and his past. But John had always had a reckless streak, and he wanted to see Holmes smile again, and if this was not why he had made those terrible sacrifices, then he had made them for nothing. He rose from his chair and stood facing Holmes. Slowly he held out his hand, where the red marks he had cut into his palm on the train a few days earlier were still faintly visible.

Holmes drew John’s hand toward himself and inspected it silently while John’s heart beat rapidly in his chest. Holmes bit his lip in concentration, and lifting his other hand, traced first the red crescents and then the tips of John’s fingers. 

“Someone else has been cutting your nails,” he said. “And the palms are far softer than you’re used to – but that is the toll of your illness, obvious. But why would that drive you to anger, to the kind of feeling that would mark your hands enough to show two days after? Yes, the coloring of the skin says these marks are two to three days old, so they happened while you traveled to London. 

“But again, why? You are not one to nurse hatreds, Mycroft would know it by now, he would be trying to use it but he isn’t. No, you are frustrated by the idleness here, you are used to using your hands and you can’t, there is a tremor in them that says you have let the rhythms lapse, enforced I would suspect, not your choice, but you chafe nonetheless. So: no vanity then, or none to speak of, but you wish to make a good impression—” and here a derisive curl touched his lips before fading back into the rapid clatter of his words “—which is why you asked for help, or at least allowed it, in the grooming of your hands. But your nails have grown since, you have forgotten to keep them up, so it is not a habit with you – or if it is, it is a practical one, and without the task to demand it you have failed to recall it. Intent to be thought well of, but also distracted. Nervous, perhaps, for your health. But you’re here, now, you were well on your way when you made these, so why the burst of feeling just as you get what you want….” His voice trailed off. "You wished to come, but you also wished to stay,” he said, a hint of reserve now in his voice. “You have had to say goodbye to people who are dear to you.” He looked up at John, pale eyes searching his face for confirmation. John had cried his full measure of tears earlier that day, but he knew the grief showed on his face as he nodded. Holmes nodded in return, and then, oddly, took John’s fingers and curled them up toward his palm, closing his hand as if in a gesture of self-comfort. He seemed slightly crestfallen, rather than euphoric as he had been in his earlier success.

“You are not what I expected,” he said again, looking away. “Mycroft can always find a place for the connivers, the dissemblers, as well as those skilled at hatred. London is full of liars, you will find. But you are—” he turned his gaze back to John “—none of these things.” He smiled up at John, but this time it was a wan thing, a mere curve of the face. Distressed by this turn, John knelt down and plucked gently at Holmes’s elbow, a gesture of comfort that he hoped would not seem too forward. At that, a bit of light cracked through the young scientist’s hollow smile. He touched John’s hand, gently, and moved it off of his arm as he rose. 

“I am due to retire,” he said, his voice level and placid, though John was no longer completely fooled by that even tone. Tucking his book in his pocket, he looked John in the face once more. “I’m glad you are here, James,” he said, quietly. “I appreciate an honest face.” John again nodded, slightly, and Holmes turned and walked out of the parlor.

John felt a sweet ache in his chest, then, at the lingering savor of those final words, and tried to ignore the sour scrape of hearing Holmes offer such compliments to him by another name. He drew a deep breath, and the scent of the flowers, piercingly sweet with their faint undertone of decay, came so strong and sudden that he felt it might knock him over. He was tired, he realized, from the day: so very tired. Drawing his hand over his face, John followed Holmes out of the parlor, and turned down the hall toward the upstairs room where James Lindsay slept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * John’s oblique reference to phrenology (a.k.a. everybody’s favorite nineteenth century pseudo-science) reproduces a common misunderstanding: true phrenology, as its proper practitioners knew, claimed to predict personality not on the basis of the contours of the skull, but rather by determining the relative size of different regions of the brain (which of course is MUCH more neurologically legitimate).
> 
> * Neurological research in the 1860s (the persistence of phrenology notwithstanding) had advanced to the point that scientists in both Germany and France had been able to link damage in specific regions of the brain to expressive aphasia (the condition from which John is supposed to be suffering). A version of Sherlock who is more interested in the biological composition of human beings (which is of course an eminently plausible way of imagining the character, just different than the route I’ve taken here) would, no doubt, be familiar with the writings of Broca and Wernicke, at least on a secondhand basis. This is a good moment to reiterate that I’ve been getting help from patterndefiance on the neurological issues in this story (at least the ones that are still scientifically legitimate).


	6. London, Part II: Islington

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry for the endless wait, y'all! I had a RL writing project that had to be tackled before I could afford to put my head back into this story. I don't want to make any concrete pledges about when the next chapter will come, but I can absolutely promise that it won't be five and a half months! Work on the next chapter is well underway, and I am hopeful that I can keep working on it on weekends, at least.
> 
> Endless thanks to [patternofdefiance](http://archiveofourown.org/users/patternofdefiance/pseuds/patternofdefiance); she keeps me right. Thanks also to [thirtypercent](http://archiveofourown.org/users/thirtypercent/pseuds/thirtypercent) for a super-helpful eleventh-hour beta, and to [redscudery](http://archiveofourown.org/users/redscudery/pseuds/redscudery) for helping me with the details of the doctor's visit. And a more general thanks, as always, to the denizens of [Antidiogenes](http://antidiogenes.tumblr.com) for general awesomeness.

John awoke, unsure of where he was. As he began to remember – the plaster moldings at the edge of the ceiling coming into focus, the angle of the light recalling the window to the busy street outside, grounding him in this bed, in this house, in London – it did not help him feel calmer. Instead, it was like touching down on quicksand: he felt only terror. What was he doing here? 

He rose and dressed himself quickly, in estranging clothing that fit him far better than his own had ever done, the soft brush of the smooth fabrics only giving further fire to his distress. What had persuaded John Watson to leave his family behind – his entire life behind – to fret and moulder as indolent as a prince in this strange house? They would see. They must have done already; he had only to declare himself and beg to be sent back to the docks, to his family’s little house in Stamshaw. Back to a world that knew what to do with him, and where he knew what to do.

Thus brimming with agitated resolve, John opened the door and hurried down the hall. From the top of the stairs he saw Willis enter the foyer from the far hall. Here it was, he thought, as he hurried down the stairs: he would explain himself. Or no, perhaps he would simply demand to be put on a train to Portsmouth. Perhaps if he left quickly he needn’t even… but then he was at the bottom of the stairs, and Willis only a few steps away. He was still unsure of what to do, but knew only that he must do something.

He opened his mouth – words not yet even formed, but surely they would come – but only a pale, croaking sound came out. He felt himself gasp like a fish, trying to choke forward some sort of sound, reaching into himself for a missing piece that had slipped out of reach. But of course his voice was gone. 

He had forgotten: he had made a trade. He had spent his last words telling Harry and Gran and his da that he was never coming back to Portsmouth. His throat buckled uselessly, his body confirming what his memory now laid in front of him.

“It’s all right, Mister Lindsay,” Willis said. She smiled at his consternation in a way that seemed gentle, even pitying, and for a wild bright moment John was struck through with both terror and delight that maybe, even without explanation, he had somehow been completely and unexpectedly understood.

“It’s everybody who hates going to the doctor,” she continued, in that same soothing tone, “but I’m sure it will be for the best. It’s not for another two hours yet, you have plenty of time. Go on for breakfast. I will find you when the coach is ready.” She bobbed her head again and slipped past him up the stairs. John stood a moment, gathering his fallen heart, and then turned himself toward the dining room. It was a small comfort to discover he could find his way there without too much thought – and fortunate, for he had none to spare. 

He ate his (once again solitary) breakfast in something of a daze, and returned to his room to swallow the tincture he had, in his agitation, neglected to take before breakfast. Already, several days’ course of the solution, combined with several weeks of self-imposed silence, had hindered his ability to use his voice, but he was unsure what might happen the next time he forgot himself and heedlessly opened his mouth, especially if he were to do so with some speech already in mind. He was no longer certain he could trust himself always to remember. 

John had never imagined – well, he had not thought he imagined – that this scheme of the Baroness’s would be easily realized. But as he stood by the window and let the bitter dullness of the tincture sank through the skin of his throat and into the muscles beneath, he felt the full dread weight of the laborious pretense as it likewise settled into his bones. 

All at once, his room felt chokingly small, and he decided to pass the remaining time in the library before departing for his appointment. As he pulled his bedroom door closed behind him, he realized that one of the other doors on the hall was ajar, and a tantalizing crevice of the room behind was visible. There were four doors between the head of the stairs and John’s own bedroom; he had counted them, blank and unreadable, as he passed them, every time he had walked to or from his room, until some point at which he had stopped, apparently accepting that they would tell him nothing. His curiosity piqued, John treaded quietly to the threshold and peered in.

This room was much larger than John’s, and furnished in darker, heavier colors. Most of the far wall stood bare, but there were books and papers crowded on a table in the corner, as well as an odd metal device of some kind, with eyepieces like a spyglass that pointed downward and seemed as though they must be decorative, although the gears on the side suggested utility rather than ornament. Other than this one table, the room seemed little used. From small shuffling sounds off to the left, behind the half-open door and outside his range of vision, John surmised that Willis or some other servant was dusting, or perhaps polishing furniture. Glancing toward the noise, John’s eye was caught by a small pile of clothing, neatly folded, on the foot of the bed, and in particular by a scarf on top of the pile; this, he realized, must be Sherlock’s room. John was somehow certain, as he cast his eyes over the room, that the younger Holmes must have arisen and departed early; but the bedclothes looked as if they had been undisturbed for several days. Perhaps the man did not sleep, John mused wryly, but ran on sheer intellectual energy. He then recalled how Sherlock had taken his leave from the drawing room the night before and wondered whether the younger Holmes was sleeping elsewhere. The thought was somehow unpleasant, and he turned away from the door, suddenly wary of being discovered, and slipped quietly down the stairs.

John found the library still and quiet, but not empty: Lord Holmes glanced up from one of the armchairs and nodded curtly before returning his eyes to his book. John nodded back and made his way to the back of the room, anxious mainly to put himself outside of Mycroft Holmes’s sightlines. There were more portraits along the back of the library, which had been concealed by the curve of the alcove wall, and John found himself studying the faces of people he presumed were other Holmes ancestors, gentlemen and ladies both. None of the people in these portraits bore such an obvious resemblance to Sherlock as the great-uncle who had, in John’s mind, come to feel like his social link to the portraits that lined the room, but he discovered that he enjoyed looking at the paintings nonetheless, taking in quirks and telling details of eyebrows, mouths, hands. John had not thought that a still image would have so much to say. The distinction he had been drawing in his mind – between the pretty and useful pieces like the botanical sketches on the far wall, and the proper art that existed (or so he had thought) only to commemorate one’s forbears, to shore up lineage or estates – did not hold so true as he had assumed. There was not exactly information in these portraits – at least not that he could read – but there were stories. He kept himself thus happily occupied until Willis summoned him to meet the coach. Lord Holmes again nodded at him, expressionless, as he left. 

The Holmes coach (or this one, John amended in his head; there was likely more than one) was a small affair, an open trap. As the coachman – Warren, John thought – settled himself in the front seat, John fiddled with the sleeve of his dove-grey jacket, and tried not to worry about the appointment ahead of him. He did not know whether to expect a genuine specialist, or a chemist, or a disgraced surgeon, or a leech with pretensions. Or even none of these things, but only one of the Baroness’s associates. All he knew was that an address had been left with Lord Holmes, to pass on to the coachman; John, for his part, had been given only a name and strict orders to go alone, and to keep hidden the tincture which the doctor would supply. But soon, he was distracted: as they rolled away from the kerb, there was nothing between John and the clattering, noisome swirl of London, all of its sounds and smells amplified in the thick heat of the late summer’s day. By the time they had turned onto the main road, John had heard three languages he didn’t know – not Italian or Portuguese, which he would have recognized from hearing the sailors who came through the docks – as well as more versions of English than he could keep track of. 

“Sir,” came Warren’s gravelly voice. John started. He had been so engrossed in watching the panoply of human activity around him that he only now realized that the coach had stopped – indeed, had stopped some moments before. John nodded, grateful and a bit embarrassed, and climbed down onto the sidewalk. Unsure of which of the row of residences belonged to Doctor Trevelyan, he turned back to Warren beseechingly, who smiled and pointed to the two-storey house half a block behind them. John smiled his thanks, pushing away the consternation he felt – once again – at being so limited in his expression. Reaching Doctor Trevelyan’s door, he knocked and was admitted by an elderly woman with a warm smile beneath an alarming pile of bone-white hair. He refused tea, and sat in the parlor wondering again what was ahead of him while the housekeeper, evidently taking the hint, disappeared through a doorway to the back of the house, leaving John to his own devices. A bowl of potpourri on the table next to him lent a faint, dry perfume to the air, ancient petals gone black as if with distinction.

The minutes stretched out. John’s throat grew dry. At last, a tall, thin form took shape in the doorway; the man who stepped forward out of that space to shake John’s hand seemed entirely made out of narrow vertical lines. “Mister Lindsay,” he said, and his voice, too, had an unnerving slimness to it, each word quick and clipped. “I am sorry to make you wait, but we must keep up appearances. We do want your coachman to talk.” He emitted a small coughing sound that John realized was meant for a laugh. John, discomfited, made to withdraw his hand, but the Doctor suddenly clutched it tightly, and offered a small, steely smile. 

“There is no need for deceptions between us,” he said softly. “I know exactly what you are.” He released John’s hand to spread his own in an incongruously gracious gesture toward a pair of upright chairs that stood next to a desk along the wall. “So let us not waste words.” John smiled tightly, deeply unnerved and beginning to be angry, but took one of the offered seats. Doctor Trevelyan seated himself in the other and again flashed a brief and microscopic smile. John simply waited, staring back at him. 

The Doctor finally spoke again. “There are some tests,” he said. “Not for your brain, we know all about it. But the tincture you are taking to still your throat can have… consequences, over time.” He paused, intent on John’s face. “Would you like to know what they are?” John John felt his heart drop, but, kept his own gaze level in return, kept himself still. Whatever game they were playing, he would not play only on this man’s terms.

“I can test for them, test your responses, make sure you are continuing to perform like a healthy person.” Doctor Trevelyan tilted his head without breaking their gaze. “Your hands will not stiffen right away – it can sometimes take years. Perhaps your vision will not be affected at all. But if the symptoms do emerge, I will not be able to counteract them, only to counsel you against continuing.” His eyes strayed briefly down to John’s hands, pressed flat against his thighs, and John fought not to clench them. The Doctor smiled again. “But then, you do seem willing to sacrifice very many things, for the privilege of losing your voice.”

John swallowed hard, caught between fighting his anger and seizing it as a bulwark against the slow tide of despair that the Doctor’s words were stirring inside of him. Abruptly he stood, and thrust out his palm. Trevelyan’s eyes closed briefly, and he pulled from the pocket of his jacket a tiny bottle similar to the one the Baroness’s maid had given him upon his arrival in London.

“A small amount, I know,” the Doctor said, “but it does not keep its virtue very long. So I will be seeing you again, Mister Lindsay.” 

John snatched the bottle from his hand and gave only the barest nod before walking for the door, steps still to prevent him from running. Closing the door behind him, he drew in breath after fresh breath, humid and fetid and yet still a relief after the cool, fragrant stillness of Doctor Trevelyan’s parlor. He shook his head to clear it and turned himself back toward the coach, hoping he could find occupation to take his mind away from the peculiar and frightening encounter of the past quarter hour.

The Holmes coach was some way up the block, where he had left it, but John thought for a moment that he had mistaken it for another, for there was already a man seated behind Warren. A few steps closer and John saw that the slim, straight figure was Sherlock Holmes. That gentleman was stirring impatiently in his seat, and when he spotted John drawing near to the coach, he sprang out and hustled John into it (which may not, in the end, have been faster, but was certainly accomplished with far greater an air of haste and urgency).

“There you are at last,” he said brusquely, shoving John into the cab with a hand to his back. “Nice leisurely appointment, was it?” But Holmes evidently had no interest in any answer John might have given, had he been able to. Having installed himself back in his own place as the coach rolled away from the kerb, Holmes pulled a calfskin notebook from an inner pocket somewhere and buried his attention in it, ignoring John completely. The passage to the neurologist’s office had felt noisy, tactile, exposed; but now Holmes’s presence, at once frenetic and taciturn, and John’s own perplexity at this unexpected turn, seemed to screen them in.

They had been traveling for about five minutes when John realized they were still on the main road, heading in the direction from which he had come the hour before; they were not traveling home, but to a different quarter of London. He glanced over at his coach-mate, but Sherlock remained engrossed in his notebook: clearly no information would be forthcoming from that quarter. John pulled his jacket around him a little more tightly, in spite of the heat of the day, and watched the buildings slide by as the coach bounced along.

A few turns took them from the wide public avenue onto a far quieter street. They went past a few green squares, the clatter of coach wheels on cobblestones the only noise to disturb the humid and heavy thrum of urban quiet. John was beginning to feel oppressed – as if these quiet, pleasant neighborhoods had swallowed them entirely – when they turned onto another commercial stretch, albeit far quieter than the avenue where the neurologist’s office had been. The coach at last pulled up outside an enticingly piecemeal row of buildings, stately stone and austere brick making neighbors of one another. Holmes stepped briskly from the cab, tucking the notebook back in his pocket, and with a jerk of his head indicated that John should follow.

Holmes led him partway up the block to a spindly-looking building of dark-painted wood that appeared to have been wedged between its neighbors – or perhaps to have sprouted up like an eager weed in a crack between cobblestones – and then rocked impatiently on his toes while John closed the distance that the taller man’s long strides had put between them. Holmes then pushed open the front door and charged up the narrow staircase that lay just behind it. John took only a moment to recover himself from his surprise at this summary self-invitation before following Holmes up the stairs, discovering there a small but sunlit room, crowded with tables and apparently occupying the entire floor of the little house. The walls were bare, other than the odd discolored patch that further darkened the already-yellowing paint. Sunlight from the French doors drew a dull shine from the wooden floors, and John could see a small flagstone patio, apparently populated by an array of flower boxes and potted vines. 

A few of the small round tables were occupied by small groups of people – including even a few women – and now Holmes led John to a table along the back, signaling as he went to a heavily-whiskered man seated at a table near the door. Holmes flung himself into his chair and immediately began drumming his fingers on the table. A moment later the bearded man appeared by their table, offering them sheets of stiff paper, but Holmes waved them away. “Coffee,” he said tersely. “And a cold plate for him. Quickly, if you please.” He once again pulled out his notebook and flicked through it.

John had been anxious and uncertain before, apprehensive about what Holmes had in mind, but now in the fact of that gentleman’s manifest irritation, he felt himself growing calmer. He made a good meal of the cold ham and pheasant that was brought him, determined not to be bothered by Holmes’s prickly silence and occasional huffs of impatience. This entire affair was Holmes’s own doing, and so presumably this incredibly tedious lunch played some part in his own larger designs. And as he had not seen fit to inform John about any of the particulars, John thought, he could not be expected to conform to the man’s expectations. Whatever they might be.

Holmes continued to ignore both John and his own cup of coffee throughout the meal, until the latter’s food was nearly gone. John winced as his knife scraped loudly across his plate, and then glanced up to discover that Holmes was watching him intently, almost hungrily. John chewed each of his last few bites very slowly and deliberately, keeping his eyes trained on a water stain on the wall nearest him, before at last setting down his silver and meeting Holmes’s eyes. Holmes stood in a single fluid motion, with such an air of promise and expectation that John rose too, before he had decided to do it. Dropping a banknote on the table, he seized John’s elbow and pulled him toward the wall of French doors. _Those doors must open_ , John thought incongruously, belatedly, even as Holmes wrenched one free and pulled him outside. The patio was closed in on all sides by the walls of the surrounding buildings, sunlit at midday but already surrendering to the creep of deep shade that surely possessed it most hours of the day. John looked all around him, and smelled as much as saw thick verdure climbing up trellises, welling up out of boxes by his feet, spilling out of pots that hung from the eaves or sat perched on precarious columns of stacked brick.

John had not been anywhere so full of plant life since before he had left for London, and now he breathed it in like a balm. He had nearly forgotten Holmes, in the space of those few green moments, as the gentleman cast an appraising eye around the patio and John simply drank it all in. But then he felt an impatient tug at his arm, and Holmes led him to a shade-steeped corner where the brick wall of the neighboring building was almost entirely swallowed by the vine that coated it, trailing cone-shaped boles of purple flowers. Most of the blooms were already past their prime, and the stones of the patio in this corner had likewise vanished under a carpet of purple and brown. 

Holmes dropped his hand from John’s elbow, and John took an unthinking step toward the flowers, eager to touch and to smell. “Here,” came the man’s voice a moment later, and John turned to see that he was now holding out the notebook from earlier, as well as a small pencil. “Draw that.”

John took the notebook and looked up at Holmes, whose eyes were as intent as they had been the night before, in the drawing room, as he had studied the marks on John’s palms. But now, seeing John’s perplexity, Holmes’s mouth twisted with impatience. “Draw the flowers,” he said. “I want to see you do it. There are blank pages in the back, use those.”

So this was the reason for their adventure, then; Sherlock Holmes had dragged John halfway across town not to take him anywhere interesting, but so that he could watch the latter pass the time with idle scratches. John suppressed a minor flare of disappointment and opened the notebook to a blank page near the back, pressing it flat at the crease so his hand could move freely over the page.

He found a spray that remained mostly fresh, nestled in close to the wall. Up close, the sweet, heavy scent that had painted light notes in the air seemed to envelop him completely. The flowers were quite interesting to look at so near, each individual blossom curved around a structured spine, carrying their color in a delicate fan of veins. John forgot his disappointment as he became absorbed in the drawing. The flowers had a daintiness that did not translate well to pencil, but John focused on capturing the shapes of the different blooms, then followed with light traces of shade to hint at the developing purple flush that dominated at first glance.

He was only half-finished when his fingertips began to tingle, pinched by a cramp in his wrist. It had required an odd angle to hold the notebook open and still put pencil to page, while yet being close enough to study the flowers themselves. He placed both book and pencil in his right hand to shake out the left, but barely had he done so when Holmes seized the book from him and began studying it intently. John blinked. Not only had a crick formed in his neck, but the light had shifted; nearly the entire patio was now in shade. The air was markedly cooler than it had been when they emerged, and the fresh, damp odor of flowers and greenery had increased. John looked at Holmes, who was still entirely focused on John’s drawing, his mouth pressed into a hard line.

At last the gentleman spoke. “Extraordinary,” he said quietly. His eyes broke from the page and darted up to meet John’s. “You are entirely untrained, aren’t you? Both my great-uncle and a cousin of mine studied drawing; I know the look of the lines one produces when the so-called ‘experts’ have done their damage.” His eyes returned to the sketch, and then to the original that dressed the wall behind John. “James, I am a scientist, a botanist,” he said. “Plants are my work. There are a great many of us who are concerned to combat the more antiquated notions still so prevalent about the origins of the earth and the nature of our lives here… and the biology and chemistry of the plant world is an essential element of that campaign. Nowhere are the natural sciences more deeply mired in the balderdash of the accrued ignorance of centuries than in botany. Not that the scientific illiteracy of the wider populace is of any great consequence, but it is difficult to make advances when one’s fellow scientists are still in the thrall of some Oriental myth.” He paused, and John – though he did not yet fully understand Holmes’s purpose – took a moment to steep in the thrill of this unexpected disclosure. 

“What I –“ Holmes broke off again, staring fiercely at John’s drawing. “I have come to realize that my work requires an assistant.” He glared even harder at the sketch, his fingers pressing white at the pads where he gripped its edge, and after several seconds of scrutiny appeared to reach a conclusion. “I suspect that much current botanical research is predicated on flawed taxonomies that are based on specious structural likenesses.” He was speaking very quickly now: almost too quickly for John to follow, certainly too quickly for him to comprehend. “I am endeavoring to develop a more accurate set of categories through study of how plants process different sorts of stimuli – deducing their functionality, if you will. But my monographs have been” – and here his lip curled – " _criticized_ for not taking adequate account of the visual data. Which of course is _precisely the point_ , but…” Holmes paused, drew breath. When he spoke again, the fervor of his voice was lower. “The point is that I… it would be a great help to me, if you were to, um, accompany me on my researches, and to make visual studies of the plants under examination.” 

Holmes had not looked at him once throughout this entire speech, John realized now – because the expression in the eyes that now met his own was nothing short of startling. Holmes had looked at John with surprise, and fascination, and then even with warmth, which John reckoned was more than many people ever saw. But to be regarded, as he was now, with a sort of half-guarded hope, felt yet more remarkable than anything that had preceded it. He felt sunlight explode within him, dazzling in its contrast to the thickening shadow beneath the flowered wall. To work with Holmes, to labor beside him and contribute to his work… it was more than John had ever dared hope. He had not thought that sheer joy could give him sunspots – and he was briefly reminded of sun glancing off the surface of the Solent, blinding him as he stared out across the docks or walked along the riverbank with Harry, but he pushed those thoughts away as the happiness surged bright and real within him.

Holmes’s wary attentiveness gave way to a smile, and John suspected the scientist could read his answer in his face. But still a gesture seemed called for, so he took back the calfskin notebook and carefully tore out the drawing, a slow careful pluck of two fingers close along the binding. He handed it to Holmes, who folded the paper carefully, took back the notebook once again, and opened the back cover. There, between endpaper and fly-leaf, John saw tucked another folded page; from the abortive scratchings on the back side, he recognized it as his sketch from the night before in the drawing room. Holmes smiled at him fully, broadly. John grinned back, suddenly intensely aware of the intimacy of the cool green cave of shadow and stone where they stood together. In this changed light, the gentleman’s eyes not grey, as they had always seemed to him, but rather blue, river-blue. Or perhaps it was seeing his face thus alight that made them appear different. John felt his smile disappear as rapidly as it had come, and stared down at his (lovely, well-fitted) shoes. Why was he thinking about this? 

When he looked back up, Holmes was watching him curiously. John gave him a careful smile and gestured toward the patio door. Holmes nodded agreement, and together they walked back through the café, down the dim and creaky stairwell and out into the surprising swath of afternoon light that trumpeted through the open street. The coach stood out against the sunwashed pavement like the figures in a daguerreotype he had seen once, hanging on the wall of a judge’s office in Portsmouth when he had gone to deliver some business news for his father, dark flat stains on the bright world that marked them out as its living inhabitants.

“Clerkenwell road,” Holmes instructed the coachman as he stepped in. “Near Goswell street or thereabouts.” He turned to John and smiled again, the brightness wrapped up in a sterner formality but still, John thought, visible in the crinkling of his eyes. “We need to stop for some art supplies.”

\----

The Holmes brothers’ household staff were well accustomed, John imagined, to seeing Mister Holmes come and go at all hours, heedless of appointed meal times. But John had, until this point, been very punctual, having after all nowhere else to be. The maid who passed them by the door to the dining room, bearing out a covered platter as they made their way in, could not conceal her astonishment at seeing them together; and though Lord Holmes more successfully masked any surprise he might have felt, he took no such measures to disguise his displeasure. He kept his head carefully erect, and dabbed deliberately at his lips with his napkin as John and the younger Holmes seated themselves. Only when plates had been brought to them did he tilt his gaze even slightly in his brother’s direction.

“Recruiting, are we?” 

Sherlock flicked a brief, amused glance his elder brother’s way as he took up his fork. “Not everyone needs to resort to short service, Mycroft.” 

For a moment, John felt the dark pinch, in his memory, of Doctor Trevelyan’s thin smile, and felt his chest constrict, as if in anticipation of the Doctor’s dark hints. But he pushed away the thought as Lord Holmes, ignoring the younger Holmes, turned to look at him. John recognized the expression: when his Gran had worn it, in the height of her rare displeasures, he and Harry had known to expect the inevitable question: “Do you have anything to say for yourself?” John had not forgotten that he abided in this house only by the pleasure of Mycroft Holmes, so he dropped his eyes modestly to his plate. But he could not help smiling to himself as he did so, because he certainly didn’t have anything to say for himself this time, did he? 

From the corner of his eye, John saw his friend duck his head as if he, too, were concealing an untoward smile. The chill of discontent from the head of the table, where Lord Holmes sat in increasingly pointed silence, grew somehow stronger. It took some moments of sedulous eating before John risked a glance at the younger brother, who caught his eye and flashed him a crooked smile before returning to the task of picking at his own plate. John’s own smile went unseen, and he kept it inside to warm himself. Perhaps London would work out, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Historical notes:
> 
> * The “Oriental myth” to which Sherlock refers is the Bible, and specifically the account of creation in the book of Genesis. The word “Oriental” was used, through the early part of the twentieth century, to refer to the part of the world we now call the Middle East, as well as to East and Southeast Asia. The middle part of the nineteenth century saw a great deal of research (conducted primarily by German scholars) into the antecedents in Mesopotamian myth, to the stories that came to comprise the canon of the Old Testament. That research had not disseminated widely through the general public, but this vein of research was keenly followed by intellectuals all over Europe.
> 
> * I was going to write a note about daguerreotypes, but then I realized it would be easier just to link y’all to [the Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daguerreotype).
> 
> * Sherlock’s crack about “short service” is a reference to some of the major reforms in British Military recruitment and management that were under debate (and later implemented) under the oversight of Edward Cardwell, who was Secretary of State for War under William Gladstone between 1868 and 1874. As part of a broad attempt to improve military recruitment – efforts that also included reducing the British garrison in the “white” colonies of Australia and New Zealand – Cardwell’s 1870 Army Enlistment Act reduced the length of required service and allowed to soldiers the option of spending more of their time on British soil (which was made possible by the decision to reduce the colonial garrisons). Although lifetime service had been abolished in 1841, it was still very difficult to leave the army after enlisting; terms of service typically ran for twenty years, and non-officers who hoped to draw any kind of pension were required to re-enlist. While the British public and press expressed very little interest, on the whole, in the issue, it was strenuously debated in Parliament, and among the members of Gladstone’s cabinet, throughout the summer and fall of 1871 (which is when this story is set; I’ve avoided being precise about it before, since exact dates do feel a bit at odds with a fairy-tale atmosphere). And so I imagine that the subject would have occupied a great deal of Mycroft’s time, sufficient to put it even on Sherlock’s radar.


	7. London, Part III: South Bank

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to [patternofdefiance](http://archiveofourown.org/users/patternofdefiance/pseuds/patternofdefiance), beta and sounding-board extraordinaire, who gave me the missing piece to tie this chapter together. I am also v grateful to [redscudery](http://archiveofourown.org/users/redscudery/pseuds/redscudery) for being an awesome Vic-picker (and offering some other good feedback besides!).

It began slowly. But gradually, Sherlock (for it quickly became the case that John could no longer think of him as “Holmes”) became more and more a fixture of John’s days. 

In the weeks immediately following Sherlock’s offer in the patio garden, they saw each other only occasionally. Sherlock would surface for the odd meal, book or notebook in his hand and at the center of his attention, or John would come across him in the parlor or the library. At these times, Sherlock would nod in acknowledgement, or sometimes smile, without diverting his focus from the task in which he had immersed himself. Once he appeared ten minutes through the evening meal and proceeded to talk animatedly to John at great length about the movement of some sort of chemical compound through the stem of a daisy. But then he dashed off before coffee was served, and John did not see him for two days after.

Meanwhile John studied the portraits that hung all over the house, and walked to the nearby square to practice sketching the foliage with his new pencils, and endured weekly a half hour spent sitting stiff and uneasy in the parlor at Doctor Trevelyan’s before that gentleman would appear and present him with his weekly supply of the substance that kept him silent. A few times a week Sherlock would appear in the library, or the sitting room, or (once) John’s bedroom, and demand that John follow him to a glass-house or laboratory – or, occasionally, into the back garden of some stately house or other whose owners he never saw – to draw something. Sherlock rarely spoke, at first; it was not uncommon, on their first few adventures, for him to offer nothing other than bare instructions, until John had finished working.

But once he had John’s sketches in hand, he would begin to talk: identifying structural elements, commenting on surface textures, occasionally correcting or even chastising John for minor mistakes in rendering the object of his attention (“Look here, you’ve got the stamen protruding at the wrong angle. You must learn to quash these sentimental impulses – what is pleasing to the eye is irrelevant to the task of accurate description.”) John learned to take these criticisms in stride, once it became clear that Sherlock was not going to throw him off. And sometimes, John’s mistakes turned out to be useful ones: Sherlock would cease speaking and knit his brows in concentration, staring at the page until some sort of comprehension dawned, his face lighting up as if a spark had caught behind his eyes. And then Sherlock would talk, rapidly, his whole body thrumming with a burgeoning excitement that it seemed barely able to contain.

“James,” he said one afternoon, as they stood by a low and fragrant hedge in the garden behind the Freemasons’ Hall, “I believe that correcting your mistakes helps me to better clarify my own grasp of the true situation.” John was, by this point, well enough accustomed to Sherlock’s corrections that he simply blew out a scornful, long-suffering breath. The whirlwind beside him ceased, briefly, just long enough to offer him a small smile before resuming his energetic critique of John’s rendering.

And gradually, after some dozen of these botanically-themed outings, John’s days began to involve more regular social intercourse with Sherlock Holmes. Whatever obligations that had kept Sherlock away from the house in the late evenings and early morning appeared to have dissolved; he appeared more regularly at breakfast, and would linger long into the evening in the parlor, reading, brooding, and talking to John in fits and starts. Occasionally he would pull out one of John’s recent sketches for them to pore over together, Sherlock advising while John filled in backgrounds or pointed out details. And when, one late evening, John accidentally yawned in the middle of an extended disquisition on spore distribution, Sherlock stopped abruptly to declare, in a wooden voice, “you’re tired,” John thought perhaps he had broken the spell; but then Sherlock said “we can take this up again tomorrow. I need to go back to the greenhouse, you can come along if you like.” And John saw – and saw through – the elaborate look of nonchalance on his face, and felt his heart warm.

\---

Some of the days John and Sherlock spent together were not so pleasant. John’s first inkling of Sherlock’s darker moods came on a day when they arrived at a particular conservatory where Sherlock had planned for them to spend the afternoon, only to find it closed for the day. After abusing the door-guard for far longer than John could see the reason of, Sherlock had fumed silently in the carriage for the entire return trip, and upon their arrival had shut himself up in his room until the next morning. On other days, Sherlock did not get even so far as the front door, but lounged instead in the parlor – or even in his bedroom – sometimes in only a morning-coat, barely stirring.

“Go away, James,” Sherlock said, on the first and only occasion that John attempted to draw him out of his malaise. 

John had been lingering by the open doorway, and now he stepped inside in spite of Sherlock’s words, unwilling to be deterred by a sour mood and the now-unaccustomed smell of cigarette smoke (Lord Holmes did not permit smoking indoors). 

“For heaven’s sake, don’t be tedious,” Sherlock drawled, as John came nearer. “If you must persist in being dull and worthless, kindly do it somewhere else.”

It was the cold and detached tone, as much as the words themselves, which cut to John’s heart. He felt the world go dark – as dark as it seemed to be for Sherlock, that day – and he clenched his mouth tightly, trying to keep his anguish from his face. He departed with only a brief nod and spent the day pacing first the parlor, and then the streets outside, in distress, his only consolation at the end of the day a worn-out exhaustion that helped usher in an easy descent into sleep.

Whatever the nature of the grief or malaise that had brought Sherlock to the point of such extremity, the spell vanished as unaccountably as it had come. When John found Sherlock hard at his books in the library the next morning, he resolved to put the prior day’s exchange out of his head as an unpleasant episode best forgotten, along with and the black humor of Sherlock’s that had brought it about. But this was not to be. The black days, as John came to call them, seemed to be a recurrent if unpredictable feature of Sherlock’s life, wreaking havoc on the gentleman himself and everyone within his purview.

They were miserable days for John, even after they had assumed a somewhat familiar pattern in his mind, and had learned (more or less) to brush off the cruel remarks Sherlock might make on such a day. He dared not imagine what they were like for Sherlock himself, trapped in this one respect far more deeply than John ever could be. But still, John could not approve of the forms of escape to which Sherlock did intermittently resort.

His first introduction to these came on a rainy afternoon, when inclement weather had delayed his return from Doctor Trevelyan’s until well past the dinner hour. After refreshing himself in the dining-room from a tray of cold chicken that the house staff had laid out for him, John had come into the parlor to find both of the Holmes brothers present. Lord Holmes sat in Sherlock’s preferred seat, at the writing-desk that looked out over the room; Sherlock himself was stretched out on the couch in the middle of the parlor, staring at the ceiling with a strange and vacant expression.

John paused in the doorway, unsure what to make of this new and singular arrangement. But with no explanation forthcoming, he slipped quietly into the room, retrieved his sketching-notebook from the desk where it lay – uncomfortably close to Lord Holmes’s stack of papers – and took his seat in one of the armchairs that faced the couch, where he could keep a furtive watch on his friend, caught as he was in the grip of some strange lassitude.

“Opium,” said Lord Holmes, from his place at the writing-desk. He did not appear to have moved, or indeed to have raised his head from his reading. John looked over at him, confused. Ever since John had become close with Sherlock, Lord Holmes had more or less ceased to address him directly.

“He’s taken opium, James,” the gentleman said, looking up at him. “It’s no use trying to – well.” Lord Holmes’s mouth twisted, his eyes dropping briefly shut. “No use trying to get his attention, anyhow.”

John nodded slowly, absorbing this information. He remembered a deckhand that had spent a few months skulking about the docks, when John had been in his early teens. John’s father had forbidden him from approaching the man, and it had been easy enough to comply: the memory of the man’s ash-green pallor and intermittent twitching continued to provoke small thrills of horror whenever John recalled him, long after the object of that fascinated horror had disappeared. Even now, he had to suppress a shiver at the memory, and fought down the gorge in his throat when he looked over at Sherlock, wondering if this might be his future.

Lord Holmes returned to his work, and John once again took up his sketchbook and endeavoured to do the same. But at last he gave up the pretense and laid the book down in his lap, eyes full on Sherlock’s supine form.

“Quite a waste, isn’t it.” Lord Holmes spoke in a tone peculiarly clear and crisp, as if to pierce the mazy tangle of John’s thoughts while he watched his friend dreaming. “A mind like a rare jewel,” he continued in still more pointed tones, “let to sit in the muck of a chemical haze.” Hs lip curled, as if in disgust. “A man with any self-respect would be ashamed to let himself go in this way.”

Lord Holmes had not once looked John’s way during this speech, but now his eyes flicked over to the couch where Sherlock lay. John, too, returned his gaze to his friend. But if Sherlock sensed their attention, he gave no sign, but rather lay unperturbed, his eyes afloat to the ceiling, looking nowhere. 

Lord Holmes’s mouth tightened briefly, but he returned to his work. John watched Sherlock a few minutes longer, his chest tightening, until at last he could not breathe – he had to be elsewhere. Abruptly, he stood. At the sound of his sketchbook hitting the floor, expensive paper swishing as it splayed and creased under the weight of the cover, John bent diffidently down to collect it, though nobody else seemed to have taken notice. Only as John moved to the door did Lord Holmes look up, briefly taking in first John’s own retreating form before returning his eyes again to the couch, where his brother lay adrift in chemical meditation. John could not bear any of it, and pulled the door closed behind him.

\---

John did not see Sherlock for nearly two days after the opium incident, and he wandered the house alone, kept inside by a persistent rain, with only Lord Holmes’s equanimity to give him comfort. But Sherlock reappeared at breakfast the following morning, as full of vigor as John had ever seen him, brimming with talk of fungus in Hampstead Heath. John was only too happy to follow him out on his explorations, awash in relief that the black spell had been swallowed up by this new project, and the end of the day found him more covered in mud than he had been since he was a small child, but delighted both with the day’s adventures and with Sherlock’s own evident satisfaction.

Sherlock was himself like a small child in some respects, John reflected, as he listened to his equally mud-covered friend during their long walk home (for Lord Holmes had claimed to need the family carriage that day, and though they had taken a cab up to the Heath, they had been unable to find one willing to take them for the return trip): he needed a steady stream of entertainments to prevent him from sinking into boredom and despair. John resolved that he would do whatever he could to keep Sherlock from boredom.

The fungi samples they had taken from the Heath kept Sherlock occupied for some days; meanwhile, John returned to the task of learning to draw orchids, which Sherlock had set him the prior week, shortly before his grim spell had descended. They were the first specimens that had presented John with any serious difficulty. Some species were simple enough, gentle and stately in their curves and points and slow, predictable flushes of color. But it was the more uncommon-looking flowers that befuddled him, even as they entranced him, startling and grotesque in their improbably ruffled edges and bright hot bursts of pigment. Often the shape of the blooms eluded him as if they were moving beneath his eyes, petals stuttering with strange texture, inner sepals curving in strange gothic grimaces. John drew until his hand ached, and discarded page after page, his fingers unlearning tulips and daisies and roses as his eyes sought a new language that could capture the peculiar beauty in front of him.

When at last Sherlock had set aside his fungus samples, he was delighted with John’s progress, and dove back into their earlier line of research with fresh energy. In contrast to his earlier lassitude, Sherlock became intent and focused in a way that took him to the verge of a different sort of self-neglect. Sherlock skipped his evening meal that day and worked late into the night, pacing and lecturing to John, even as the latter struggled to keep his eyes open; when John returned to the library the following morning, he found Sherlock still dressed in his clothes from the day before, hovering over a growing ledger of notes. And though John was deeply relieved that Sherlock’s malaise had passed, he could not help but hope that this newfound manic fervor would also somehow be interrupted.

That interruption came, at last, from an unexpected quarter. They were the library together, comparing John’s rendering of a Burmese orchid from the prior day to a color plate in a large leather-bound album, when one of the servants came rushing in and handed a small slip of paper to Sherlock. Sherlock took the note, scanned it in an instant and handed it back to the man with a casual toss of his wrist, his eyes already back on John’s drawing. “Dull. Tell him no.”

The servant bobbed his head and withdrew. After a few minutes, Sherlock appeared to sense John’s inquiring expression. “From one of the police inspectors,” he explained. “He wants me to come out and inspect a crime scene. He frequently consults me about cases when there is botanical evidence that has some potential bearing on the details,” Sherlock continued, as John felt his eyebrows raise still higher. “He used to call in person, but I have made it clear that I prefer a written note. But to return to the matter at hand, do you notice the regularity of the speckling on the lip….”

John returned his attention, somewhat reluctantly, to the album plate. Police work, he could not help thinking, sounded exciting. And so he was secretly pleased when, about forty-five minutes later, a uniformed man appeared in the doorway of the library. John had never seen the man before, and did not know if his was a ruddy complexion, but at the present moment he appeared to be in high flush, either from exertion or excitement or some combination. He entered the library with some trepidation, stopping a few feet shy of the table where John and Sherlock stood.

“I said no, Gregson,” said Sherlock, without even an upward glance this time. “We’re busy.”

Gregson looked curiously at John, as if just now taking note of his presence. “How do you do, sir.”

Sherlock now looked up. “This is James Lindsay. James, Inspector Gregson. The Inspector was just leaving to go back to his utterly humdrum murder.” John nodded politely and smiled, but the Inspector seemed unable to smile in return, evidently disappointed. John felt a pang of regret, broader this time: not just for himself and the prospect of a day’s adventures, but for Inspector Gregson, and for the victim whose killer Sherlock was not interested in bringing to justice. John laid a hand on Sherlock’s sleeve, drawing Sherlock’s eyes to his. He tipped his head slightly toward Gregson.

The officer glanced between them and renewed his efforts. “Please, Mister Holmes. We’d like something to tell the husband. And we’re baffled, as is.”

Sherlock sighed expansively. “Yes, of course you are.” He pressed his lips together, then nodded slightly. “All right. Where is it?”

“Dunton road, near Southwark.”

Sherlock returned his eyes to John’s sketch. “We’ll follow in half an hour.” Gregson said nothing, shifting slightly on his feet, clearly torn between gratitude and uncertainty. “Half an hour _after_ you leave,” said Sherlock, rather sharply. “We do have work to do here. Now if you please, James, let’s return to the question of pigment distribution, shall we?”

\---

In the end, it was simple: the leaf mulch around the body was a red herring, collected several days beforehand and deliberately scattered. Within two minutes, Sherlock had ascertained that the mulch was a false clue, and worked out the circumstances of its collection, and deduced that the husband had killed his wife and was attempting to frame the gardener.

“You’re getting quite a reputation, Mister Holmes,” said Gregson, as the three of them stood in the fine-misting rain, watching a pair of officers lead the perpetrator away in cuffs. In the wake of the arrest, the Inspector seemed almost gleeful. “He planted that evidence just for you, I reckon.”

Sherlock only sniffed, though John could tell he was pleased. “Not much of a reputation, if he believed that sad trick would confound me.” Sherlock sighed in a way that John was beginning to suspect was deliberately theatrical, and turned without a word back toward the road, where the Holmes carriage waited. John sighed a bit, too, realizing it was already over – he had found the entire series of events enthralling and would have preferred to linger longer, basking in the excitement of the scene and in the effects of his friend’s penetrating observational skills. But he nodded to Gregson and turned away to walk back to the carriage where Sherlock waited, letting the sounds fade away behind him, not turning back.

Sherlock’s eyes skimmed over John as he climbed into the carriage, taking in John’s facial expressions and posture as keenly as he had the leaf detritus at the crime scene a few minutes earlier. John had learned to endure these surveys without distress, for it had become clear after those first few days that Sherlock had accepted him as James Lindsay, formerly of Inverness and now settling in London. John did not doubt that he had made mistakes in his carriage and behavior, small slips that could have led Sherlock back to the truth of John’s history, had the former thought to search it out. But Sherlock looked at him, John knew, and saw someone honest, forthright, frank in face and gesture where words were beyond his reach; someone to rely upon, even to trust. And so John had been able to relax, because this was his temperament, as well as James’s, and he needed no primer. There was only the one lie between them. 

“I know an inn, not far from here, if you would care for some lunch.” Sherlock’s voice brought John back to the present; his eyes, fixed on John’s face, were soft. John, still a little crestfallen about their abrupt departure from the crime scene, attempted to return a smile to match the one that lay behind the creases around Sherlock’s eyes. He nodded. Sherlock inclined his head in return, clearly pleased, then leaned forward to give Warren directions. John did not think to glance backward until they were almost half a street away, and the milling crowd of officers and curious neighbors had faded behind the general clutter of a moderately busy London street.

This inn, clearly a more official establishment than the one they had visited in that first week, was more typical of what had by now become their habitual outings; a simple but inviting room with large windows that admitted broad swaths of pale-grey London light. They took a seat toward the back of the room, and with a flick of his hand, Sherlock summoned a waiter and ordered beef stew for John and coffee for himself. They had fallen into this routine, by now, which John supposed suited Sherlock’s peremptory nature as well as it did his own enforced silence. John could not precisely recall when Sherlock might have worked out how much pleasure John took from a plate of good beef, but he relished it none the less for that.

The girl had barely departed when Sherlock turned and fixed John with an intent look. “The gardener’s shoes, did you observe them?” John took a moment to think back to the crime scene, then shook his head; he had, he realized now, been entirely caught up in watching Sherlock work, and had not attended to the details of the scene itself. This realization was a bit discomfiting, but fortunately his friend was off on an explanation, involving a great deal of broad gesticulation, of how the soil deposits on the man’s shoes were a clear sign that he could not have been responsible. John discovered himself to be at once attentive and distracted, and on account of the same general cause; and this fact discomfited him further. He was grateful when food and drink arrived a moment later, and it was with many kinds of appreciation that John tucked into his meal. Sherlock ploughed on, undaunted, while John ate, stopping only occasionally to make sure he still had his listener’s attention.

A quarter of an hour later, John’s bowl stood empty, but Sherlock’s coffee and his explanation of the crime scene remained in progress. John had recovered himself somewhat, and managed to return his concentration to the substance of Sherlock’s discourse rather than the movement of his mouth and his hands, when Sherlock abruptly ceased in his flow of conversation and glanced up over John’s shoulder. John followed Sherlock’s gaze and twisted round to look at the figure who had approached their table.

The man who stood just behind John looked vaguely familiar, his face plucking at the edges of John’s memory just as his form plucked at the edges of his vision as John sought a posture that allowed him to face their visitor properly. He was, John could see, of a well-formed figure, and dressed in elegantly-cut clothing of a very fine cloth.

The man opened his mouth, but then hesitated slightly before speaking. “Holmes,” he said at last, with so many layers of meaning woven into that single word that John was incongruously reminded of Sherlock’s elder brother.

“Nottidge,” Sherlock answered, rather carelessly. The animation had gone from his voice, and he sounded – not bored, precisely, but certainly differently disposed to this conversation than he had been to the one it replaced. Nottidge clearly detected the change as well, and his posture stiffened. John still did not know why he felt Nottidge to be vaguely familiar, but found himself acutely embarrassed on the man’s behalf.

“You are – well?” Nottidge queried, at last. “It’s more than a week since I’ve laid eyes on you.”

“Yes, quite well. Busy.” Sherlock’s eyes were anywhere but on their interlocutor, and the emphasis on the last word of his reply was quite unmistakable. John, much as he disliked this unexpected intrusion on his time with Sherlock, felt a pang of sympathy, for he well remembered what it was like to be on the receiving end of his friend’s casual disdain. This man was obviously ill-accustomed to it, and indeed seemed stung by Sherlock’s treatment. At this last remark, Nottidge’s eyes dropped quickly to inspect the toes of his shoes, and the gentleman had only partly mastered his expression when he looked up again some moments later.

“Are you, ah, still working with the orchids?” he ventured, in a more or less level tone. Sherlock gave only a slight flickering nod in response. With nothing more forthcoming, Nottidge tried again to draw a response. “And how does the work proceed?” The timbre of the man’s voice struck a familiar chord in John’s mind, and he realized all at once how he knew this man: he had been one of the other gentlemen on the pleasure-boat on the Solent that evening.

Sherlock, who obviously did not welcome the continuation of this line of questioning, took this moment to signal for more coffee. John, caught between curiosity and a sense of sympathy for the gentleman, abandoned elegance and turned his chair around halfway, so that he might regard (and acknowledge) Nottidge properly. He caught only a glimpse of something on Sherlock’s face as he turned. 

“Forgive me,” the man said to John, as if noticing him for the first time. “Henry Nottidge.” He smiled politely and extended his hand to John. John dredged up some kind of answering smile and shook it. Nottidge’s smile disappeared when John said nothing in reply, and he released John’s hand with something like suspicion.

Another uncomfortable moment of silence ensued between the two of them before Sherlock recalled his responsibility. “This is James Lindsay,” he said to Nottidge. “Baroness Adler’s cousin, from Scotland, in London for medical treatment.”

“Oh, yes, I had heard.” Nottidge’s gaze softened slightly with sympathy. “You are –” But his address to John stopped almost before it had begun, for Nottidge was evidently unsure how to converse with one who lacked the capacity to speak in return. John was reminded that such consternation was hardly misplaced; indeed, it was far stranger that John had succeeded so well for these weeks, speaking as it were without speech to those few people who now populated his life.

“His health is excellent,” Sherlock broke in – if such it might be called – with some energy in his voice, for the first time since Nottidge had arrived. “He is no invalid. Although the vocal dysfunction persists, it is no serious impediment to communication.”

As warmth had replaced wariness, now something new came into Nottidge’s face. “I see where you have been spending your evenings,” he said at last, eyes still fixed on John but evidently speaking to Sherlock. John gazed coolly back, for though he was unsure why Nottidge was suddenly subjecting him to such close scrutiny, he would not be cowed by clothing finer than his own, or by the intruder’s evident connexion with his friend.

And John wondered, now, about the substance of this history: what lay behind the complicated mix of emotions Nottidge was enduring, as he was confronted with the knowledge that Sherlock was so often up late in the library or parlor, studying books and drawings with John at his side. It was a change, John supposed, from Sherlock’s earlier habits, which found him so often away from home in those hours. The thought occurred that the two gentleman had, perhaps, been research partners, and that John had in that manner replaced him. John felt, for the first time in several weeks, conscious of his lack of schooling, of the vast ignorance that underlay his little talent for sketching.

Then Nottidge’s gaze cut over to Sherlock. John saw the flicker of raw anguish behind his eyes and felt a fresh and alarming clarity crash over him. His face burned with embarrassment – at the forced encounter with this new and uncomfortably intimate knowledge about Sherlock, at his friend’s apparently cavalier attitude toward his own depravity, and at himself in discovering he still knew his friend so little. He discovered that he could not bear to keep looking at Nottidge, and lowered his eyes, ashamed in the face of his relative ignorance, and feeling also a glimmer of anger, hot and confusing.

Fortunately, neither of the other two gentlemen appeared to have taken note of John’s disquiet, but seemed rather to be absorbed in the various discomforts occasioned by their exchange. A few other insincere pleasantries passed between them while John regained his composure in the privacy afforded by comparative unimportance. At last Nottidge made to withdraw, and inclined his head briefly in John’s direction, while John offered a tight smile in return. 

John turned his chair back round to face the table and was met by what seemed to be an empty space that had opened between him and his table-mate. Sherlock stared into his cup, stirring what John suspected to be only the last dregs, and now seemed little inclined to talk. The bill had appeared on the table at some point in the prior few minutes, and Sherlock paid it in silence. They returned to the carriage under the mantle of that same silence, and Sherlock spent the drive home staring determinedly out at the street. John, for his part, was discomfited, and angry, and felt for some indistinct reason very lonely, even with Sherlock only a few feet away. Caught between the desire to know more about Sherlock’s history with Nottidge and a powerful distaste for that very information, John made his peace with the silence.

\--

One encounter, however unpleasant, was not sufficient to dislodge the growing ease and comfort that John found in Sherlock’s company – and, he hoped, that Sherlock found in his. Sherlock never spoke again of Nottidge, or of any other prior intimacy; John came to realize over time that this silence arose not from shame but from indifference. A few stray comments about the gentlemen they occasionally encountered on their jaunts about town led John to conclude that Sherlock had little attention for other people. John could not help but think uneasily of Nottidge the next few times they moved together in public, particularly when Sherlock took them to dine, in the following week, at an establishment that neighbored the Royal Botanic Society gardens. But even that evening, in the territory of Sherlock’s unofficial collegium, passed with only a few brief and friendly greetings from acquaintances, who seemed well content to greet John only in passing, and neither subjected him to a test of merits nor Sherlock to any sort of personal scrutiny. And as the days passed unchanged, their newfound rhythms undisturbed, John’s discomfort at the revelation of Sherlock’s more dissolute proclivities faded. It seemed that the connexion they had formed, peculiar as it was in some respects, was yet sturdy enough to withstand both this aspect of Sherlock’s nature and John’s discovery of it.

If anything, their bond seemed the more secure for its focus on less private affairs. Of his botanical investigations, and the sights he had seen in his travels abroad – and even a few of the police investigations for which he had furnished assistance – Sherlock could talk for hours, in even the most inhospitable circumstances, pitching his voice to carry over the clatter of traffic or keeping John awake for long hours in the parlor when even the streets outside had gone quiet. Sherlock’s passion for explanation was such that John wondered if the man had ever had a friend before. There were many kinds of silence, he saw now, of which his own was not the worst.

John found himself once again reflecting one morning on the strange balance of Sherlock’s character in the course of an unusually long carriage ride. They were headed for a destination about which Sherlock had remained tight-lipped, not quite the typical detached hauteur that carried him over the minutiae of an ordinary day, but a rather a deliberate effort, for Sherlock had dropped a handful of what seemed to be hints (which had not helped John in the slightest, for he could not make sense of any of them). But whatever the specifics Sherlock had hoped to communicate or to avoid, he had done his job: John was eager to discover where they were going.

John glanced over at his friend, but could not long keep his eyes off the view from his own side of the carriage. Their route today had taken them almost directly south along the major boulevards, and the streets were jammed with increasingly grand outfits the nearer they drew to Buckingham Palace. John had never been close enough to see the royal gardens as more than a distant spot of gemlike green, but as he watched the white walls rise into view on the far side of the spreading emerald sea, he realized that the sight of the palace, while certainly stirring, was not nearly the momentous event he would have imagined it to be only a few months ago. How things had changed, he thought, stealing another brief glance at Sherlock, with a surreptitiousness that seemed unnecessary, for the latter was lost deep in thought. He was perhaps brooding over the new findings about seed development in the simpler plants (monkit? manicod? John had heard the word many times, but still struggled to remember it) published last week, which seemed to trouble his own observations; or the question of John’s voice and its failure to improve, a matter in which he had recently taken a worrying interest; or perhaps musing over some other conundrum still in its infancy, whose details he did not yet feel ready to disclose. But that he would someday disclose them, open his thoughts up to John for scrutiny and mutual inquiry, John felt certain, and it caused in him a particular sort of quiet delight. 

When back in Portsmouth he had dreamed of a greater life, watching the waves from the dock or lying awake while his family breathed peacefully around him, John had pictured solemn halls and great houses, a world of prestige and politics all drawn in dim outlines, for he had scarce known how to imagine what he desired. But never would he have imagined this, serving as an assistant – and friend – to the most brilliant man in London as he explored the very frontiers of knowledge.

John stirred himself from this reverie and realized both that the carriage had stopped and that Sherlock was looking back at him, with an expression of unwonted diffidence. Lifting his gaze wider, in an effort to ascertain some clue as to their whereabouts, John saw the grey-green body of the Thames rising up to swallow the end of the street in front of them, and on the far side the green lawns of Battersea Park. John felt a moment’s dizziness as he remembered another river, and Sherlock beside him pale and unmoving; and as he looked back at his friend he saw again, for a moment, that same remote and fascinating stranger, all the elegance of pen-and-ink against the sand in the fading light of sunset. John felt himself briefly swallowed afresh by the flush of fear that had taken him over at the prospect that this astonishing figure should never again stir; but now his friend sprang from the cab all easy fluidity, with a small brief smile that left a lingering shadow of warmth.

John followed Sherlock out of the carriage and across the street, to a wrought-iron gate, all overgrown with greenery, that opened out from a high brick wall. Over the top of the wall, John caught a glimpse of the crowns of several trees. The gate stood open, but in the comparative hush of this quiet set of streets – theirs the only carriage in sight, and the uneven clatter of distant street noise cloaked by the susurration of the river – the black ironwork seemed as much warning as welcome, to screen in its private holdings for the use of the few rather than to extend a general welcome. But Sherlock strode to the gate as if to the door of an old friend, and John squared his shoulders and fell into step behind him.

Beyond the gate, a broad graveled avenue stretched out in front of them, through a band of trees and out amongst low, stretching lawns punctuated by raised beds. The plantings were not repetitive and symmetrical, as John had come to expect from a formal garden, but seemed endlessly various, profuse and cacophonous: here a wild burst of knifelike leaves, there a cluster of flower-coated stalks, with a low spread of round speckled leaves between them. John scanned the beds eagerly, rapidly, having learned with Sherlock that he needs must absorb quickly; but Sherlock’s pace had slowed to an even, meditative walk, a pace that John might have (in someone else) been tempted to call a stroll. The strong lines of his face had also gone slow, and his eyes soft. It was not a faraway look – though to one who knew him less well, it might have seemed so – but rather as if what was always distant had been suddenly brought close. John, desirous of allowing his friend some privacy, dropped to a crouch by the nearest bed to inspect the plantings.

But a moment later he felt a touch at his shoulder, and so he rose and followed Sherlock deeper into the garden, until they reached a bench that faced out over the planted beds. They sat, and John took in the changing tones of the planted beds, the drift of a gull across the horizon, the slightly sinister stature of the strange and gnarled tree that loomed to their left, dotted with tiny black fruit. To his right, Sherlock opened his mouth as if to speak, only to close it again in evident perplexity. John regarded his friend quietly, content to wait, even though Sherlock himself seemed strangely discomfited, poised on the razor’s edge of speech.

At last, John succeeded at catching Sherlock’s eyes as the latter cast about in his distraction. John held his gaze with steady calm, and after a moment Sherlock ducked his head slightly, his eyes crinkling. He straightened and cleared his throat. 

“I was eleven when Mycroft first brought me here,” he said. “Took me to see the bed of poison plants. Poisons were a bit of a hobby with me at the time.” His brow creased with another faint hint of smile. “I had set up a sort of chemical laboratory in the back of the kitchen. Mycroft was likely trying to ease our mother’s mind by finding me some other pursuit before any of our dinner guests took ill.” Sherlock looked up briefly at John, and then down at his hands. “I had imagined plants to be dull. I was…. Well. I was mistaken.”

Sherlock fell silent and set his hands down on either side of himself on the bench. John became, all at once, keenly aware of his own hand where it rested only a few inches away. That sudden razor brightness in his mind melted downward, became a slow thrum that built in his chest as he considered lifting his hand, closing that distance, brushing Sherlock’s fingers with his own. He had very nearly resolved to do it when Sherlock abruptly drew his hands back into his own lap.

“People are…. difficult, for me,” Sherlock said in a low voice, as if navigating a tight clench in his chest that mirrored his hands, and John felt gripped too by the tenor of intimacy in this declaration. “So much chatter and clutter, and one is expected somehow to _care_ about it all, as if the minor flickerings of our minds and hearts are important. And yet, in all the clamor to be recognized, they still – they lie.” Sherlock turned to John, face almost beseeching. “A plant is simply itself, mysterious to us at first because of what we do not understand, but only ever itself. But people lie, James, lie endlessly, and yet one has to navigate the lies, learn how to read them, if one is to make any progress of the sort that is expected.” He made a face somewhere between a grimace and a smile. “I’ve given it up, mostly. There is a certain quantity of conversation and collaboration that is necessary in undertaking scientific investigation, but beyond that requisite intercourse I have had little wish for company.”

Sherlock looked over at John and offered him a wistful smile. “Your face reproves me,” he said – and then, lifting a hand gently, as if in correction – “even if you do not. I know there are honest men. But the human mind is a labyrinth, an unutterable tangle of confusions and wishes and resentments….” He gave a quiet chuckle and shook his head. “It is no wonder so many people become lost in their own fabrications.”

Sherlock grasped his hands in front of him and stared at them. “Long before I knew I wished to study plants, I—” he stopped, frowned, straightened; tipped his chin and began again. “Many ancient philosophers employed a mnemonic technique called the memory palace. Storing the things one learns in various rooms. The idea quite appealed to me when I first encountered it in Cicero.” Sherlock paused, pressing his lips together in an almost wistful expression. “And so I sought to make my own. But I found that I could not always move the information about as quickly as completely as I wished – it wasn’t always so easy to pluck something off one shelf and put it on another. The older ideas, they became entrenched, were harder to move about.” 

He gave a quick jerk of his head, and began to speak again, more rapidly. “Not quite the right analogy, then, a palace. But here, there are garden beds for particular classes of medicinal plants; there’s the poison bed, of course; beds for all the different counties of England – one for Lancashire, of course; and the glass-house; and might another garden not have a bower, or a gazebo, some other man-made structure to house information that cannot be planted? One can move a particular specimen from place to place, watch it take root and adapt to different soils. So I…” and here he dropped off completely, and was silent so long John wondered if he would speak again. 

Mouth still working, eyes still downcast, Sherlock bent down and retrieved a fallen leaf from the graveled walk. “And so I have a mind garden,” he said quietly, staring at the leaf as he rubbed it between his fingers. “Quite a large one of course,” he continued, dropping back into something more like his regular demeanour, his pace once again rapid-fire. “Two ponds, several greenhouses of course, a handful of outbuildings to house superseded methodologies on the off chance that I need to consult older materials that rely on them.” And then the tide of explanation slowed, and Sherlock’s eyes dropped again to the ground. “A work in progress, of course, such things always are, but for the most part I am able to keep the world well in order, though –”

Sherlock’s speech ended like a snuffed-out match, and he looked up at John almost sharply. “I don’t know whether you have ever had occasion to mistrust your own mind, James. My memory is excellent, of course, and I am not susceptible to wishful thinking. But there was a night, some months ago, when I.” He paused for breath, which seemed to be coming harder, though John had never seen him lose his wind when walking rapidly through London, and they had been sitting for some long minutes. “I was in an – an accident, of a kind. My life was never in danger, but I was… compromised. I lost consciousness for some amount of time, which…. well, I was alone, and disoriented. But I saw….” He trailed off into silence. John, his heart pounding, did not stop to think or to fret, but reached out and seized his friend’s hand urgently, desperate to hear at last Sherlock’s account of the evening that had occasioned such a profound transformation in his own life.

But Sherlock only smiled sadly down at their joined hands, turning his own hand upward in John’s. “What I saw did not make sense,” he said at last, stroking his thumb along the inside of John’s palm. “I did not understand it then, and I understand it even less now. But I –” he closed his eyes, as if in pain. “We cannot trust our own senses, sometimes, for they lie to us.” He pressed his lips together. “As surely as we lie to one another. Perhaps sometimes, that is why we do it.”

He looked back up at John, face soft and vulnerable. “You will not – please do not tell anyone.” John nodded, feeling as if his heart might break, and squeezed Sherlock’s hand briefly. He was so filled with emotion – his insides astir with feelings he could not name – that it was some moments before the absurdity of Sherlock’s request struck him.

Sherlock saw his grin and gave a low chuckle in return. “You are an excellent confidante, James,” he said. “I forget just how secure, sometimes.” His voice dropped very low, and he smiled shyly. “You do not seem silent to me.”

John had to look away. He swallowed and struggled to compose his face, fixing his eyes on a pair of gulls as they wheeled in the sky above the looming, gnarled tree. He felt a sudden and surprising stab of longing for that unfettered state. His breathing calmed as he watched them, sitting here in this garden, bound by touch and by confidence to the friend he loved more dearly than any other in the world, perplexed by his own longings.

John felt the press of Sherlock’s fingers against his, tentative. “James?”

The name grated roughly against the tender frontier that had opened inside of him. He released the birds from his sight and turned back to his friend, and offered the best smile he could muster, acutely aware that, for all of his improbable good fortune, there was nobody in his life to speak the name by which he knew himself. Sherlock’s eyes were still gentle, but now his brow creased slightly in concern. But it was not the first time they had been so caught, Sherlock unable to inquire as he wished. This time, John was grateful for it. John only squeezed his hand again and released it, and stood up from the bench.

Sherlock stood as well. “I have a mind to show you the Lancashire bed,” he said. “They have very poor specimens of the peat mosses, which really are the most interesting feature of the county, but the seed-heads of the bog-cotton are quite distinctive. Although even the bog-cotton does not grow quite properly here; I suspect the acidity of the soil is wrong. ” He turned away, caught up in this new line of thought, and walked deeper into the garden, still talking. John followed silently, as he always did.

\---

It was some days after their visit to the Physic Garden when, sitting together at the table in the library, Sherlock leaned across John to retrieve a book. He placed a hand on John’s shoulder to steady himself in his reach, and at the soft weight John felt himself convulsed by a deep shiver, once again breathless though he had barely stirred in the past hour. Sherlock’s hand lingered briefly, as if the touch itself were deliberate; and as the tightness in his chest twisted sweetly, John’s whole life stood open to him as it had not done before. The nature of his feelings for Sherlock broke open in his mind like great cascades, each one fresh and overwhelming. First was humiliation that he had known himself so little, that Harry’s first guess at the midsummer fair had been right all along. The next was shock, to discover in himself the ferment of a desire that he had, so recently, found troubling and even repugnant in the very object of his own longing. He had changed, how irreparably he had changed, since leaving Portsmouth. But no, the feelings themselves were not new; he was forced to confess to himself that he had felt them, in some murky form, even on that first evening by the Solent. If he had changed, it was in becoming both braver and more cautious; but even those threads had lain always within him, even if his encounter with Sherlock had set the spark to them. He was still himself, changed only inasmuch as he was no longer deceived about what that meant. And with this realization came the last wave, calm like a thick blanket descending. To have a name, finally, for the inchoate yearning he had so long felt was a great relief, even as he realized that it would never be fully answered. If this was the feeling Sherlock gained from his pursuit of an ever-refined understanding of the natural world, then John now had an inkling of why he sought it so tirelessly.

John looked carefully up at Sherlock, who was narrating his quarrel with the encyclopedia and seemed not to have noticed John’s moment of revelation. Sherlock glanced down, offered the brief quizzical smile that meant he was wondering at John’s private thoughts, and continued on in his diatribe. John smiled back, tranquil in the renewed sense of his own extreme good fortune. To be the assistant and the friend of so extraordinary a man was already a blessing beyond what John would have ever dared hope for. He would, he resolved, be content with his life as it was – and in this moment, the resolution felt easy, for it was everything he had thought he wanted, and almost everything that he actually did.

\---

A few days after his epiphany in the library, John returned from a stroll in the park to find Sherlock seething in the parlor. John was surprised to find him there, for Sherlock had declared his intent that morning to attend a lecture of some kind, and had departed not two hours before.

“Ah, James!” Sherlock said, with a sort of electric brightness which, John had learned, was a sure sign of foul temper. “It will perhaps please you to learn that you are living with the only competent botanist currently alive in London. Did you know – I would wager you didn’t – that it is possible to spend two years in the Amazon and return _still convinced of the essential soundness of Lamarckianism?_ ” He slammed his hands down to the armrests of his chair and burst up to standing. “It’s useless, it’s worse than useless. And at the Linnaean Society! We are a disgrace to the nation, James, to the profession, we are…” He grasped his head with both hands, pulling at his hair with frustration. 

John, having recovered himself somewhat from the surprise of finding Sherlock at home, hastened to intervene before Sherlock worked himself up to a full rage. He crossed the room and opened to the latest entry in his sketchbook: a series of drawings of moss. Sherlock had seen some earlier drafts of the renderings that John had copied out from a survey of Lancashire, but these newer drawings were better executed than the first, and next to them John had laid in some small sketches of the moss that collected at the edge of the small pond in the square. 

Sherlock took the book from him and leaned in, eyes narrowing. “I see your point about the splaying of the rhizoids,” he said, after some minutes, frowning. “Though of course the peat mosses are an entirely separate genus. But you aren’t to know that. Stansfield’s representations can’t really be trusted, he hasn’t your eye for the physical traces of development. Half the time he conflates the bryophytes completely.” Looking up from the page, he bit at his lips, and seemed to be working something out beneath the ledge of his eyebrows.

“It would be better, I think,” he said at last, “if you were to see them for yourself. The peat bogs, I mean. I could take you up to Lancashire with me, to, um. Conduct a study, of a kind.” He paused and glanced briefly over at John. “If it would be interesting to you,” he added in a careless tone. “Only a thought.”

John sensed the careful orchestration of detachment in Sherlock’s voice and, setting aside the flurry of practical concerns that had immediately arisen in his mind, he smiled and took his friend’s hand. It was easy to smile, for here was an unprecedented intimacy: Sherlock had just invited him to remove with him to the Holmes family estate, to leave London behind. And Sherlock was, if he understood correctly, offering to tutor John in the rudiments of proper scientific study.

He did not know, in truth, how he would continue to supply himself with the tincture that dulled his vocal cords, without Doctor Trevelyan or the Baroness to arrange matters, and of course he could not ask them. He had been silent for so long that it seemed just barely possible that habit, combined with conscientiousness, could keep him from speech. Possible, but still a great risk.

And he worried, of course, about the boredom. John had never been to the north and did not know what he could expect, but it was by all accounts very stormy and isolated. Bogs and moors seemed a poor consolation for the intellectual life of London, even if Sherlock found it wanting. John felt, afresh, the old pinch of anxiety, wondering how his company could ever be enough for Sherlock.

But he smiled, and Sherlock smiled back. “Good then,” he said softly, and John knew then that he would do whatever he could to ensure that Sherlock would continue to smile for him.

\--

“I think I’ll be wintering at Eldersburg,” Sherlock announced at dinner the following day.

Lord Holmes glanced up from the document he was inspecting and raised his eyebrows. “I thought you detested winters in the north.”

“I detest winters everywhere.” Sherlock set down his wine glass with decisive fervor. “There are some soil studies I’d like to pursue,” his tone taking on a note of mocking, “all terribly detailed, nothing you’d care about.” He picked up his glass again and took another sip. “I’ll hardly be missing anything.”

Lord Holmes only pursed his lips and returned to his file, but John thought he seemed pleased.

“Willis will come up with us, I think.”

“And why, pray tell, will that be necessary?” Lord Holmes did not lift his eyes from the page this time. “Surely you do realize that Eldersburg is still maintained while we’re in town. Just as I continue to eat and sleep while you’re away.”

“You certainly do,” Sherlock returned dryly.

“At any rate, we cannot spare her here,” Lord Holmes continued, ignoring this. “Your presence, however great an imposition on your peers and guardians, will hardly overtax the capable hands at Eldersburg. They are certainly well accustomed to your habits,” he added delicately.

“One servant to accompany two residents is only practical, I think.”

Lord Holmes set the file down.

“How do you mean, exactly,” he said evenly, his eyes steady on Sherlock.

“James will be coming with me,” Sherlock replied, in a casual tone John recognized as deliberately assumed, his eyes roving the corners of the room as happened when he was uneasy of mind and aiming to conceal it. John, already troubled, had nearly stopped breathing.

“Mister Lindsay’s medical treatment is ongoing,” Lord Holmes said, his tone still level but each word carved out with crisp, unfriendly edges. 

“There are specialists in Manchester,” Sherlock snapped. “Surely they are, at a bare minimum, no more incompetent than his doctors here, managing nothing in _months_ , I’m beginning to suspect I could do better myself….”

“Chemical experiments again, dear brother? You would likely end the affliction by ending the man himself.” Lord Holmes offered a sour smile. “Probably not satisfactory.”

Sherlock folded his mouth unhappily and was silent, glaring down at the table. John was by now accustomed to being invisible whenever Sherlock and his brother exchanged sharp words, but on this occasion the unpleasantness of feeling himself a piece of furniture, rather than a person, brought its own relief. He sensed – in the childish set of Sherlock’s face, and in the complacency with which Lord Holmes settled back into his chair with file again in hand – the contours of an old pattern. 

But after a few minutes of this stalemate, Sherlock spoke again, eyes still on the table. “Whatever it is, Mycroft, we’ll manage it,” he said tightly. “I will be sending inquiries to Manchester in the coming week. We will remove north at the end of October.”

“Just as you say, brother. I trust you have the matter well in hand.” Lord Holmes had returned to reading his document, draped almost carelessly over it with his chin in his hand. The cool neutrality of his voice might have deceived John some months ago, but it did not fool him now. Sherlock’s plans, or more particularly his plans to take John with him, had for some reason upset Lord Holmes greatly; and now John feared that the subtle, subterranean conflict Sherlock had somehow set in motion would continue to work its way through the ground beneath them.

\--

John spent the following morning alone – Sherlock had gone to hear a paper at once of the societies to which he belonged, and so John had kept himself busy with sketching in the square, until a light rain drove him inside to page aimlessly through an album of English native flowering trees, which Sherlock had brought home the week before fresh from the printers. But though the prospect of Sherlock’s return continued to pluck lightly at the surface of his mind, no such interruption occurred; and when the bell rang for dinner, John entered the dining room with no little trepidation, unsure of his reception by Lord Holmes after the unpleasantness of the night before, in which he had taken no part but which seemed to take him as its object.

His worries were, in the event, unfounded. An advisor sat with Lord Holmes, in Sherlock’s usual chair, and cooperated in ignoring John completely as he entered. John did his best to return the favor, and concentrated on his kidney pie while the two men spoke in lowered voices of names like Gladstone and Cardwell that, John realized with dull surprise, he no longer much cared to know. 

John was pushing the last of his potatoes around on his plate with his fork when he heard familiar footsteps in the hall. Sherlock barreled into the dining-room, eyes bright with excitement, and barely paused to send a disdainful glance to the man in his chair before pulling up to the table next to John. John turned toward him inquiringly.

“James,” he said, voice almost a whisper yet aglow with suppressed energy. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lord Holmes’s gaze slide briefly over to his brother before returning to his own interlocutor. “I’ve been invited to join a, um, a research team. An oceanography expedition. They have need of a botanist. It is an opportunity beyond my wildest hopes, James. We’re to sail in the spring…”

John listened without hearing, his heart sinking, until he caught the words “your sketches”. Sherlock must have observed the shift in John’s posture, for he broke into the steady stream of his own explanation to add, in a gentler tone, “You will be coming, of course. It’s not yet decided where we will be stopping along the way, and what drafting supplies will be available, so we will need to make extensive provisions before setting out. Thomson’s secretary will put me in touch with the quarter-master….”

“Sherlock.” Lord Holmes’s voice came like a ribbon of thick grey cloud, swallowing the sun in a half-second’s space. “He won’t be joining you on the expedition.”

Sherlock turned in his seat to square off against his brother. “Don’t be ridiculous, Mycroft, of course he will. I need him with me.”

Lord Holmes looked back toward to the gentleman who sat, visibly uncertain, in Sherlock’s habitual chair. “Leave us, please,” he said quietly. The man stood quickly and withdrew as Lord Holmes returned his attention to his brother and sat back in his chair, raising his eyebrows. “You do realize, Sherlock, this isn’t a passenger ferry, with space for the asking.”

“He is _my assistant_ , Mycroft,” Sherlock ground out, “and he is coming.”

Lord Holmes smiled thinly. “Yes, I’m well aware. But I believe you overestimate your own importance, Sherlock. Do you really suppose that Thomson has set aside two berths for you on that ship?”

For the second time in as many conversations, Sherlock’s face went mulish. “I will demand it – I will inform him it is a requirement of my passage. _You_ will demand it.”

“I shall do no such thing,” Lord Holmes replied. “Whatever makes you think I have the kind of influence….”

“Oh come off it, Mycroft,” Sherlock exclaimed, nearly shouting. “Everyone knows your ‘minor position’ gives you the ear of the prime minister, and with that any damned thing you wish for is at your disposal….” 

Lord Holmes rose to his feet with a whip-like swiftness John had not thought to attribute to him. Sherlock’s speech faltered, and John realized suddenly that the rage was only bluster: beneath the shouting, Sherlock was deeply perturbed. 

“Sherlock,” Lord Holmes murmured, his voice dangerously quiet. “Compose yourself.”

Sherlock glared up at his brother. “You are not my only avenue,” he said coldly. “I have contacts at the Royal Society. Thomson was returning to Somerset House, after the lecture. I’ll find him myself.” Sherlock flung himself to his feet, jarring the table violently as he did so, and stalked out of the room without a glance backward. 

It was not quite silence, that heavy unspeaking cloud that lingered after Sherlock’s departure. John watched his fork as it settled slowly into stillness against his plate in a fading thrum of tintinnabulation against the china. As the small, piercing vibration faded away, an airless quiet descended. 

After a moment, Willis appeared at the servant’s entrance, looking timid. “Some port, please,” Lord Holmes said, not looking, not turning, stiffly upright, his fingertips still resting on the table.

A moment later, Willis returned with the decanter and two glasses. Lord Holmes nodded in dismissal and poured out two glasses. “James,” he said quietly, holding out a glass. “Will you join me in the library, perhaps.”

It was not a request. John stood and took the glass, and then realized that Lord Holmes was waiting for him to lead the way. He felt the hair prickle on the back of his next as he went the door, down the hallway, through the cold marble foyer and into the warm dark tones of the library. He stood in front of one of the red armchairs, waiting for Lord Holmes to take the other.

But Lord Holmes instead entered as though John were not there at all, and crossed to the far wall to stare up at the portrait that hung there. (Lady Charlotte Vernet, John thought, though he was unsure.) “Close the door,” he said. John walked back to the doors and drew them shut, and felt himself unaccountably unnerved at the soft click of the latch. The library had become a place that John shared with Sherlock, a place he could retreat to on his days alone and feel a sense that Sherlock was still with him. But here, with Lord Holmes and without Sherlock, it was a different room.

Lord Holmes stood for a full minute, still staring up at the portrait, with his back to John, until he swung round and fixed John with a chill stare.

“Your history is very hard to track down, Mister Lindsay,” he said. “Local records report that the infant James Malcolm Lindsay, born to Roderick and Annabel Lindsay some twenty-eight years ago, died in infancy of the ague.” John stared back at him, his insides going cold, as an edge of sour mirth came into the lines of Lord Holmes’s face. “Given which,” his interlocutor continued, “you are looking remarkably well.”

John clamped down on the tremor that had begun in the pit of his stomach. As the months had worn on, his fear of being unmasked had gradually faded, but now the old terror crashed over him as fresh as on that first day. But he set his jaw and looked back at his challenger. Lord Holmes might think nothing of tearing down John’s life, but surely he would recoil from inflicting damage on his own brother. 

Lord Holmes gave a slow but expressive wave of his hand. “But it doesn’t matter who you are, or where the Baroness found you. Irene can play at whatever cloak and dagger game she likes. She does enjoy her manipulations.” Lord Holmes’s voice had dropped into a lower register, became for a moment confidential, almost warm. “Nothing of substance will come of it,” he continued. “As you surely know by now. If one wants to rule the board, one must secure the key pieces.” His eyes followed the swirl of the last few drops of port in his glass as he tipped it. “And for that, one must know where to look. Irene isn’t clever enough for that, and neither are you.” He looked back up at John, his eyes hard. “Even if you are cleverer than you look.”

John, indeed, did not feel clever, his confusion matched only by his alarm. Whatever the Lord Holmes was accusing him of seemed far more serious than his actual transgression, posing as the Baroness’s cousin. Lord Holmes continued to stare at him with a gaze as intense as any John had seen on his brother’s face. John felt a thrill of fear travel up his spine, even though – or perhaps because – all around that penetrating stare, the mild lines of Lord Holmes’s countenance had not changed.

Lord Holmes, his eyes still on John, continued to twirl the empty port glass in his fingers. “What matters, Mister Lindsay,” he said with dangerous softness, “is that I know _what_ you are.” He paused and examined the fingernails of his empty hand. “While I do not tolerate spies, you’re clearly no threat in that respect.” John, aghast, barely caught his mouth from falling open in shock. “But what is of concern,” Lord Holmes went on, “is your new project.” Lord Holmes set the glass down on the table with a resounding crack, and when jumped slightly at the sound he jumped also. He was closer to the fringes of his self-possession than John had ever seen him. But he collected himself almost instantly, and returned a cool gaze to John's face.

“For you do have one in mind, don’t you,” he said softly. “A project. A _conquest_.” 

Amidst his fear and uncertainty, John felt a hot beam of wild joy cut through him. It was a feeling absurdly incongruous – as Sherlock might say – with the present danger in which he found himself, and yet the thought of Sherlock vulnerable to him, caring perhaps as John himself cared, for a brief moment eclipsed everything else.

John’s face had given away his thoughts, and Lord Holmes’s own countenance darkened. “You’re quite pleased with yourself, aren’t you,” he said harshly. He crossed the room in long strides, bearing down on John, looming over him.

“I tell you, Mister Lindsay,” he said, in a near-whisper like a stiletto. “Sherlock may be an innocent about human nature, but I promise you that I am not. I know a liar when I see one, and I prefer not to see my brother hurt. He will be removed from your purview, and will have the career suitable to a man of his talents. I will not have him left vulnerable – not to anyone, but especially not to a sneaking piece of filth with ambitions.”

John reeled back, shaken bodily by this last speech, by the thought that Lord Holmes – or anyone – should think that he wished to injure Sherlock, to ruin him.... He closed his eyes to steady himself in a world knocked out of alignment, himself spinning loose and helpless within it. To be torn from Sherlock in the name of protecting him – it was too much too be borne. 

Unthinking, John cried out in protest. No words came – only a harsh gurgle of sound – but Lord Holmes did not miss it. He stepped back from John, face closed up in complacent triumph.

“I thought as much,” he said.

Shaken and miserable, John said nothing. Lord Holmes returned to the table, retrieved his glass, and began to address John again as he strolled to the door.

“You will stay here, of course, for the duration of the preparations; Sherlock will not have it otherwise. But when the time comes, he will join this expedition, and you can crawl back to whatever sewer you came from, for he will forget you.” Lord Holmes paused, hand on the open doorframe. “And if you try to follow him onto that boat I will grind you into flotsam.”

Finally left alone, John collapsed into a chair, shaking with consternation, with rage, with despair. When at last his legs felt steady enough to bear him, he fled upstairs to his bedroom and dropped onto the bed, too shattered even to weep.

\--

John did not leave his room again that day, but sat motionless in his chair by the window, watching the world stream by as it had on that first isolated day. He was again alone. Staring out into the bustle of the street that had in the past few months become so familiar, he thought miserably of Sherlock, out somewhere in the streets of London, in search of a solution that did not exist. Lord Holmes, he was sure, had taken a hand in securing Sherlock a place on the oceanography expedition; and he would, John felt certain, make sure that John himself had none. As afternoon shaded into evening, and when Willis came to tell him of dinner, he sent her away and thought of Lord Holmes downstairs, dining alone, secure in the confidence that he had found a way to keep his brother safe from a grasping and manipulative predator who would interfere with Sherlock’s research.

Nor, he thought, as he watched the horizon dim with evening, was Lord Holmes entirely mistaken. Sherlock was a brilliant scientist, and this expedition, however his place on it might have been gained, was only his by right of talent, of training, of skill. But even that was not the whole of it. Sherlock cared nothing for prestige, beyond the success of his ideas; but John had seen him alight with the thrill of pursuit, the vibrant snap of his mind engaged with a problem, the shining enthusiasm whenever he came across the chance to see something new. He had seen that light, in rare and vivid shade, written across Sherlock’s features when he spoke of the upcoming expedition. Indeed, the bare prospect of such an exploration made John’s own heart quicken. Even his dim and rudimentary studies were enough to enable him to understand that Thomson’s expedition was, indeed, the opportunity of a lifetime. John could not stand in the way of it, keep Sherlock at home to fret and chafe at the necessity of relying on the researches of others. He could not forgive himself if he did.

It seemed only a few moments later when John startled to the sound of his door opening. The room was nearly entirely dark, though the lamp on the mantelpiece had been lit, apparently while John had slept. He straightened in his chair (feeling an uncomfortable pinch in his neck as he did so) as the door opened, and half-rose from it when he saw Sherlock enter.

“James!” Sherlock was in a state of high agitation as he half-stumbled across the floor to John. Alarmed, John came to his feet and stepped forward, grasping his friend’s outstretched hands. 

“James,” Sherlock said again. He stood for a long moment, simply staring at John’s face. John looked back, drinking deeply, fiercely. The lines of Sherlock's cheekbones were faintly illuminated by the light from streetlamps outside, coming through the window, even as the rest of his form was cast into velvety black by the lamp behind him. John wanted, suddenly, desperately, to touch him, but instead he gathered his hands in on themselves and turned away.

Sherlock seemed to accept this; out of the corner of his eye, John saw him withdraw to lean against the table along the back wall. “It is no good, James,” he said, his voice deep and hoarse. “I am… the voyage is fully staffed, fully crewed. I am, myself, a late addition – there was a scholar from Cambridge who took ill and had to withdraw. It is all long in place. Thomson told me himself that he can do nothing.”

It was only what John had expected, but it still came as a blow. He nodded, blinking back tears, and stepped back toward the window, retreating.

“So that’s it, then.” Sherlock’s voice came through the darkness, and under the exhaustion he sounded angry as well. “It doesn’t bother you, does it?”

John whirled round and stared at Sherlock, his own temper flaring to hear such a thing said. Sherlock stalked to the mantelpiece, took up the lamp and bore it back across the room, holding it up to John’s face. John tipped up his chin and stared resolutely back. 

Sherlock stared at him, eyes narrowed. John swallowed hard and fought not to drop his eyes, and at last Sherlock’s face relaxed, leaving it almost childlike in its uncertainty.

“It is hard for you, too,” he said slowly, as if in confirmation.

John could not prevent a small scoff. 

“I have… I have not yet signed a contract,” Sherlock continued tentatively. “I could…”

John reached up swiftly to grip his arm, hard, and Sherlock fell silent. John pressed his lips together and stared fiercely back at Sherlock, willing him to see how thoroughly John rejected this course, as much as he dreaded Sherlock’s going.

Sherlock broke away and pulled at his own hair. “There is _no reason_ why this should be impossible,” he snarled. “You would be an, an asset to the entire expedition. You are, you are very…” he trailed off, then stepped close again to touch John’s arm. “You are very… useful to me.”

John had to close his eyes, then. He would have to say goodbye, to let go, and it was only becoming harder with each passing second. He pulled his mouth tight, reached up to touch Sherlock’s arm in return and stepped back, eyes still closed. Sherlock caught him by the shoulder and pulled John back. John’s eyes flew open, and he tensed his shoulders, preparing to shake him off, to fight if necessary. He could not be so close anymore, he – 

Sherlock kissed him.

It was over almost before John realized it had begun, and then Sherlock was breaking away, hands gripping his shoulders painfully hard, eyes boring into his own.

“James,” he said, a bare exhalation of sound, as if his voice were trapped in his throat.

John ached to say his name in return. He reached up and traced a finger along the line of Sherlock’s jaw, and Sherlock’s eyes fell shut.

And John discovered that his skin, his hands, the touch of his lips were all he needed to speak.

\--

In the almost supernatural stillness after they had both found release, John was still panting quietly when he felt Sherlock slip away, out of bed, only to return a moment later divested of his shirt, which in their urgency they had not managed to remove. He slid a newly-bare arm around John’s waist and pulled him close, burying his nose in the curve on John’s neck, below his ear.

“So you see,” he murmured, “I cannot leave you behind. It is impossible. We will find you a place on that ship one way or the other.” He pressed his lips to the skin of John’s neck and then chuckled gently, his breath ghosting along John’s skin. “I will smuggle you on if it comes to that.”

John was glad Sherlock could not see his face, could not see the anguish at war with joy. Sherlock, who had never wanted for anything, had finally found two things that he wanted – and by some miraculous turn of fate John was one of them – and did not yet seem to understand that he must choose. Sherlock, who for all of his vast education knew so little of the cruelties of the propositions that the world would present to a man, when he had the temerity or the misfortune to desire something. John traced his hand lightly along Sherlock’s forearm, impelled by equal parts desire and grief, and tried to put out of his mind all the things he knew that Sherlock did not. 

 

\---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * Opium use would have been increasingly stigmatized in England in the beginning of the 1870s, when this story was set, but was still at this point have been legally available to Caucasian men. But this was soon to change: in 1878 Britain passed the Opium Act, which limited the use of opium to registered Indian opium-eaters and Chinese opium-smokers and specifically prohibited the sale of opium in any form to people of Burmese extraction.
> 
> * The garden to which Sherlock takes John is the [Chelsea Physic Garden](http://chelseaphysicgarden.co.uk/), which was founded in 1673 by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries and really does have a dedicated bed for poisonous plants (as well as several dedicated to medicinal ones). The regional beds are an invention of mine, although that might also turn out to be true. Many lovely (though contemporary) images [here](http://www.londontown.com/LondonInformation/Attraction/Chelsea_Physic_Garden/bca7/imagesPage/21920/). I’m grateful to [ivyblossom](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ivyblossom/pseuds/ivyblossom) for talking me into using this particular garden.
> 
> * Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) was a French scientist and an early proponent of evolution, and the first to offer a coherent and comprehensive theory. Even though Lamarck did not invent the notion of “soft inheritance” (that is, the idea that a plant or animal can pass on to its offspring the adaptations that have developed within its own lifetime) he is widely credited with/held responsible for it. Soft evolution has always been viewed skeptically at best, and was rejected by Darwin. 
> 
> * Eldersburg, the Holmes family estate, is located in a part of England that is now Greater Manchester, but before 1974 was part of Lancashire. Like Sandleford (the Adlers' estate in Hampshire) the name is kind of an easter egg; it's not a literary reference, however, just something fun you'll be able to turn up with a bit of elementary googling.
> 
> * The voyage on which Sherlock has been offered a berth is real: the Challenger Expedition, which sailed in late 1872 under the direction of lead scientist Charles Wyville Thomson. The name of the expedition probably has uncomfortable resonances for most US readers of a certain age – as it does for me – and this is no coincidence; the 1986 Challenger space shuttle is one of several shuttles that was named after major nautical voyages of the prior century, and takes its name from the expedition I refer to here. But that ominous resonance, though unavoidable, is not at all part of what I’m aiming for; I can’t switch off the creepy feelings it might give you, but I can at least reassure you that not the slightest grain of the shuttle disaster makes its way into this story.


	8. Portsmouth Harbor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the last full chapter, but I have also posted a brief epilogue. please read that too!

The wind came cold over the water. 

John’s finely cut coat fit him closely, better than his old clothes had ever done. It had never left his mind, how bitterly cold Portsmouth could be in the deepest reaches of December; but the wind seemed sharper than anything his body had ever borne. He hadn’t known that he had forgotten. 

Next to him, the ship creaked, groaned out her weight as if to contradict the light slaps of water against the hull. John had been standing here for some hours, but now he noticed anew the looming silence that draped like a dull curtain over the harbor; even those small brushes of sound cast great echoing shadows into that deep stillness.

The wind was up from the south, and so although John stood quite close by the ship – half a dozen steps would bring him close enough to touch the hull – she did nothing to shield him from that piercing wind. He could hear it whistling knife-life through the rigging and pulling deep mournful notes from the mouth of the great steam funnel. John had been startled to realize, when first he laid eyes on her the day before, that the Challenger was really a small ship, smaller than any he had helped build. So small a thing, to bear his entire life away.

This was an hour at which the old John Watson would have been at home in bed, like all decent folk. But now, John had no decent man’s bed to go here; only a cold room in a cold house that existed to give shelter to those who were strangers here.

There were paths here that he knew, but he did not follow them, and stood instead by the cold swirl of the harbor in the tenebrous light of pre-dawn. 

When the teaching elders in his church had spoken of Hell – as they often did – it had been fire and brim-stone. But with his back to a cold bench and wind rattling in the eaves of their clapboard church and knifing into his very bones, John had felt the dull conviction that hell must be very cold. 

He had said as much once, to his father, one night in his thirteenth year, on one of the first really bitter nights that had kept them late. John remembered it well, recalled how pride at being enough an adult to work until suppertime had clashed with the endless prickling misery of the wind off the harbor. He had mostly meant it for a joke, but his father had frowned. “Take care you do not talk blasphemy, John,” he had said. “You mean it lightly, to be sure, but it is not a joking matter.”

John hadn’t thought much of hell, or of God, since leaving Portsmouth, nor indeed of his father, whose company he had not expected to miss. But now the old feeling of quailing before his father’s face ran together with all the old doctrines.

What Hell was like he would almost certainly discover soon enough. He had turned his back on the family that had raised him, and had not looked back. He had left them for a life of leisure and adventure; and the work he undertook with Sherlock was important, of course, but it was also a life that brought him pleasure. And of course the pleasure itself was sin, what he and Sherlock shared; whatever John felt, it was no union in God’s eyes and could not be. He remembered that now. The version of John who had lived in Portsmouth could not have forgotten it.

The memory of this old self was like the cold grip of iron around his wrists; implacable, but also foreign. John Watson had been silenced, if not slain outright, during the days in weeks at Sandleford, when he had shed his family and his past like an old coat; John Watson had given up his voice in exchange for a different name and an artist’s pencil, and the chance to rove the streets and gardens of London with Sherlock Holmes. 

But Sherlock’s party had left London behind two days ago. They were in Portsmouth now: Portsmouth, which tomorrow would witness the launch of the much-vaunted Challenger Expedition. Sherlock would wend his way across half the world’s oceans, ere he set foot in London again; and John, his future even less certain, had noticed a quiet hum building at the back of his throat where, for so many months, he had felt only a dull rasping silence.

John would not be returning to London, either. Lord Holmes had not taken further occasion to reveal his mind or his plans to John, but after their confrontation in the library there was no need of it. John now understood the rules of the game, and knew who controlled the board, and Lord Holmes knew that he knew. Lord Holmes was a statesman, genial in victory, and too subtle a strategist to confer on John the further distinction of being the enemy of Sherlock’s enemy; in both word and deed, he remained at all times the picture of courtesy toward John. But his eyes were cold when nobody else could see them, and John knew with flint-like certainty that Lord Holmes would sooner send him to the workhouse – or the coal mines, or indeed the glue factory – than give him shelter in Sherlock’s absence. Protecting his brother meant allowing John to remain, for those last few months while Sherlock remained in London. And so Lord Holmes mounted only a perfunctory resistance: murmuring “your room, perhaps, Sherlock,” the first time he came upon them kissing in the foyer; sitting patiently through a week of evenings in the parlor while Sherlock tutored John on the pianoforte, note by careful note. 

At another time, John thought, Sherlock would have noticed the undercurrent of deception, would have sensed a trace of the coming betrayal in the crook of his brother’s wrist, or the pudding selection at supper, or some other near-invisible detail. But for the entirety those few precious months, Sherlock hummed like a plucked wire, and all his hostility remained directed at the implacable march of the encroaching future. Having committed himself to the expedition, Sherlock spoke of it only in terms of frustration and irritation. Some days, his complaints had been so vehement that John had let kindle the hope that Sherlock might withdraw and choose instead to remain in London. But it was an idle fantasy, and he had never been able keep it alive for long. John’s time was limited, and he knew it. This particular future moment had always awaited him – and now it was here. Five months since he had handed his old clothing to the Adlers’ maid to be burned, thirteen weeks since Sherlock had first kissed him, he was here again, the home that was no longer home.

As the days had dwindled, John had stiffened his spine and paid a visit to the Adler mansion, for the first time since his early days in London. The Butler who opened the door had recognized John immediately, murmuring only a courteous welcome as he had led John to the dove-grey sitting room, and John had briefly felt himself fortunate as he seated himself to face the great fireplace. But it was red hair he saw reflected in the mirror over the mantelpiece a few minute later, rather than black; and it was Kate who had explained to him, in long angular vowels that now sounded so strange, that the Baroness could do nothing more for him. John had only sat and nodded in dumb acceptance. He was not surprised, for he had remembered the limits of the Baroness’s promises. But he had needed something to hope for, and he had traded those precious few months of flickering hope for the moment when Kate had extinguished it, smiling at him with sincere regret. That had been two weeks ago.

It had been four days since he had last swallowed the tincture that Doctor Trevelyan provided, four days since his last vial had run empty. He had been to see the Doctor the day before they had departed London, still unsure as he knocked on the very door whether he would accept his usual provision, or what he would do with it, if he did. But John had spent only a few minutes in that inhospitable sitting room, breathing the cool dry perfume of desiccated roses, before Doctor Trevelyan had emerged from the back chambers, the expression on his face not quite his habitual fixed smile. John wondered, as he rose to his feet, whether the Doctor’s manner was somewhat altered. 

“Mister Lindsay. I understand you will be traveling soon.”

Doctor Trevelyan’s conduct toward John had been much the same since that first visit, and since that initial appointment the Doctor had always spoken to John with a tenor of sly and sinister knowingness underpinning respectable language. But a different timbre threaded through his voice now, woven in amidst the smugness and mockery. 

John fixed his mouth firmly and tipped his chin downward. 

“To the seaside!” The Doctor’s smile – still somewhat ghastly even in attenuated form – now faded from his face, and the grating slide of his voice softened almost to gentleness. “But not further, I gather.”

John jerked his head in another nod, staring at his feet. To have the compassion of this man was nearly unbearable.

“I see.” Doctor Trevelyan inclined his head in return, smug and staccato, and John was almost reassured by his renewed pulse of animosity for the man. The Doctor continued to nod – as if the motion were a lamp whose flame he had forgotten to snuff out – but then suddenly ceased, pressing his fingers together. “Perhaps, then…” 

And he had vanished, then, into the mysterious back apartments of the house, returning a moment later with a very small vial which he held out to John. John frowned and shifted, trying to get a better look, but the dark, oily-looking interior seemed to resist his sight.

“Belladonna,” he said. The eerie smile once again unfurled on his face. “I trust the botanist’s assistant understands.”

John closed his eyes against the mixture of revulsion and gratitude he felt as he took the vial from the Doctor’s outstretched palm. 

He had slipped it into his trouser pocket and managed to forget it, until he dropped a hand into that same pocket later that evening and the cold touch of the glass vial nipped at his finger and startled him. The next morning, as soon as Sherlock had stepped from the room, John had pulled it from his pocket and looked at it long and hard, that small, smooth bar of cold glass in his palm, before sliding the poison back into his pocket. He knew the moment might well come when that touch of cold on his fingers offered its own kind of comfort.

It had been cold, too, in the inn they had let upon arriving; the fireplace in their room had sustained some sort of damage to the flue, and they could barely keep a fire going, and so had spent their first night in Portsmouth huddled together on the hard bed. They were active enough to chase the cold away, though tired from the day’s travelling. 

After their passion had spent itself, John had touched his tongue to the hollow of Sherlock’s neck, tasting the sweat that had gathered there -- a thin, desperate bid to gather every drop of Sherlock that he could before they parted. 

He had felt Sherlock smile in the dark, cheek pressed to John’s hair. “Gathering data?” he had asked, in his midnight rumble. John bit his neck softly in response, then nuzzled up against the tender skin, collecting scent, collecting touch. 

Sherlock submitted to these ministrations for a few moments, stroking John’s hair through his own stillness. But then he slid his hand down to John’s chest and pressed him gently backward, so that they could look each other in the face.

“It needn’t be the last time,” he said quietly. “For awhile, yes. But James.” Sherlock lifted his hand and traced his fingers along John’s hairline. “Do not think I will forget you, while I am away.” Stricken, John tucked his face back into Sherlock’s neck; the thought of Sherlock missing him, searching fruitlessly for him upon his own return to England, grieved him almost more acutely than his own loss.

Sherlock cupped John’s jaw and gently pulled his face back up. “James,” he repeated, running his thumb across John’s cheek. “I swear it, however long the voyage… if you are no longer at my brother’s house, I will come and find you, when the expedition is over.” Sherlock’s brow furrowed, as a new doubt seemed to pierce him. “That is, if you still wish….”

John leaned up and kissed him, hard, the press of lips nearly painful as he gripped the back of Sherlock’s neck. Whatever misapprehension might stand between them, this was one he could not bear. 

John had kissed him until he tasted blood, and then broken away, touching Sherlock’s lips gently. Sherlock smiled beneath his fingers, but his face was drawn and sad.

“I will… try to find you,” he said. John touched their lips together softly, once more, and then brought his own hand up to cup Sherlock’s jaw, to trace the lines of his extraordinary cheekbones. Sherlock pressed John’s hand to his face and kissed his palm. “The scientist’s pledge, then,” he murmured. “We will do our best.” He bit his lip and drew breath once, twice, as if speech had become difficult. “There are… there are no fixed points, in this age of change.”

John kissed him again – unwilling to let go, but unable to look any longer at his face – and felt a damp trickle against his cheek. He squeezed his eyes shut, willing his own tears away until after Sherlock had fallen asleep.

But the morning had brought a different side of Sherlock. If he had gone to bed seeming to dread the incipient voyage, he awoke restless and impatient for it to begin. After gulping down his coffee, Sherlock had stalked off to the dockyards with barely a glance at John, and upon arriving had begun snapping at everyone who had a hand in final preparations, from the deckhands to Captain Nares, and ignoring everyone who did not. However sincere his professions of the night before – and John did not doubt them – Sherlock’s mind had switched tracks, and all of his considerable energies were dedicated to the Challenger’s departure, and to causing worries for those who were not (to his mind) taking adequate steps to ensure that the expedition would launch as scheduled. 

Sherlock had little confidence that the sailors and deckhands working over the ship were truly exerting themselves, and expressed this assessment very loudly and at frequent intervals. Sherlock was not content with the laboratory space that had been set aside for him in the converted gunwales of the ship, and had no kind words for the craftsmen who labored over the last-minute adjustments to suit his specifications. 

John, brittle as he was, could hardly bear to be near Sherlock, even as he trailed after him around the ship, unwilling to let go of these final hours in his company. Sherlock’s companions on the upcoming voyage, who had much less cause than John to love him, were not so reserved. It was during the tour of the supply rooms on the lower deck that an officious-looking man in grey wool strode into the room and pulled Sherlock into the passageway for a private colloquy. John remained behind in the converted laboratory, along with two other members of the scientific staff and four consultants from the Royal Society. None of whom made any pretense of continuing their own conversation, but stood together in silence straining to hear the harsh, whispered conversation transpiring in the passageway outside the door. Eavesdropping became easier as the men’s voices rose. 

“Your idiocy has never been my concern until now, that’s why,” came a familiar deep voice, and John winced as the rest of the men exchanged amused looks.

“Damnation, Holmes,” the other man roared. “One more word and you _are_ finished. Balfour can do our flora samples.”

“Balfour!” John could not help smiling at the familiar timbre of outraged horror in Sherlock’s voice. “He’s not a botanist! It doesn’t go down in families, Thomson, surely even you…”

“He’s also not an odiferous scab,” thundered his interlocutor. “You hold onto your temper, sir. If I hear any more complaints, we will give up our brilliant botanist for peace of mind. And if you think the crew won’t thank me for it….”

The men’s voices dropped back down to inaudible levels, and the six scientists somewhat awkwardly resumed their earlier discourse. Sherlock returned a few minutes later, visibly fuming but also quiet. John wanted desperately to give him comfort, but of course dared not approach him, and Sherlock did not glance his way. 

John left the ship at around six in the evening, when hunger got the better of him, and sat quietly in the sitting room of the inn. The cheerful clutter of background chatter from the inn’s other patrons made a pleasant cushion against the cold outside, and the silence of John’s own table was leavened by the fragrant crackle of the fire next to him. But still the long empty stretch of the evening reminded him of his first few weeks in London. He felt, as he did then, as if he were sitting on the surface of the world rather than within it, quiet and lonely with all his roots cut.

The clock had struck ten when the Royal Society’s deputy engineer – who had traveled with them from London in order to inspect the ship’s forensic instruments – staggered through the inn door to his room down the hall. John, shaken from a dozing stupor by the clamor of the door, had realized dully, in that moment, that Sherlock would likely be sleeping aboard the ship this last night. He would not return to the inn.

John had been halfway to the door before he realized he had risen at all, and halfway to the docks when he realized that he would not sleep at all, this night. And perhaps never again.

He stood, now, in the piercing chill, letting the cold wash over him because there seemed to be no reason to protect himself, anymore, from the elements: no future to live for, and nothing to preserve. The final inspection of the vessel, he knew, would come in the early morning hours, and then the Challenger would cast off and move out to sea. 

John glanced back at the dark city. A faint touch of light had blossomed over the horizon, a pale brightness that for John brought only darkness. There was no more promise for him in this life, and no release in the next. He shivered, and as if in response to his body’s call the wind lashed forth again. The impossible chill seared through him in an echo of burning, and in an instant it came together: this razor-sharp horizon between heat and cold was a hell he could understand. It was two terrible pains that offered no relief from the other. 

So this was to be his eternity, the cold burn of the in-between. He could not repent. It might be sin to feel for Sherlock as he did, but yet he could not forswear it; there would be nothing left of him afterward.

And then, through the thick silence, through the implacable stony cold, a voice came, dreamlike.

“John.”

The tone was low and tentative, and the sound so brief that it was over before John noticed it at all. He felt himself stiffen, but he did not turn; already it seemed more like an idea he had had than a sound he had heard, so long had it been since that had been his name outside his own imagination. 

But then it came again, with more energy, crying out “John!” And he realized the voice, with all its sweet familiarity, was not the issue of his own mind, even though it was the same voice that most often spoke his own name, whenever he still heard it in his head.

He turned, and his surprise drew a response from his healing throat: “Harry?”

It was the familiar silhouette, angle of the head, soft brush of hair against shoulders. And yet her aspect was changed, as if some invisible cord that had silently bound her together heretofore had somehow come unraveled. John was too wholly startled by her presence even to be happy again. He felt, as if from a great distance, his mouth fall slightly open.

“Oh, John!” Harry surged forward, as if she had been awaiting some signal from him, crossed the small distance between them and caught him up clumsily in her arms. John felt, first, invaded – it had been some months since anyone other than Sherlock had touched him, and her embrace was almost too sudden to be welcome. But he schooled himself into putting his arms around her in return, and then the next moment he was hugging her tightly, awash in exhausted relief. 

She leaned back and smiled at him, and all at once the old familiar sweetness clashed with things he did not remember, a gawkiness to her gestures that did not conform to recollection, a strange acrid odor that lay at odds with the accustomed lye-soap scent of her skin. 

“Harry,” he said again. It felt strange, to be once again expected to come up with things to say. 

“It’s so good to lay eyes on you again,” she said. “I thought I never might, you know.”

John swallowed. “I’m glad too,” he answered.

Her smile dimmed, just a bit, he thought, though in the near-blackness it was hard to tell. “Are you, then,” she said softly.

John felt a painful lurch of regret in his gut. “I am, Harry, really, I….” his voice stumbled over so many words, so much wear on his voice, and he stopped. And Harry, clearly taking his agonies for emotional, went alight with concern, just as she always had done when confronted with John’s distress. She stepped back, and stood a moment quietly while he gathered himself.

“I am glad,” he said at last, with all the earnestness he could muster.

“Well, the important thing is that you’re here now,” she replied, her voice light. He flinched, and she did not miss it; it had been, he realized, a trap that she had set. He stared at her, eyes hard and stern in her loving face. She was just as he remembered.

“Of course I know, John,” she said, a brittle laugh breathing after the ends of her words. “Do you think I just wander the docks at night? It’s all the city’s talked of for weeks, this expedition. Of course I heard his name, eventually.” She pressed her lips together tightly. “Your scientist. So I… asked about, a bit more.” 

John said nothing. 

“I waited at the inn for a while,” she continued, her voice now tentative. “But you didn’t come back.” 

John was suddenly very tired. “That seems to be what I do,” he replied.

Harry heaved a frustrated breath. “For God’s own sake, John!” she cried out, stamping, and he could not help but flinch at the rawness of the noise. She had always been irrepressible, warm and lively, but never so unraveled at the edges.

“Harry,” he ventured, as the realization crept firmly in, “are you… have you… gone to drink?”

Harry gave a sour laugh that went on a second too long, before gathering herself into a stiff line. “Do you think it’s been easy, without you?” she asked flatly. “Since you _left_? It’s… Gran’s near gone to pieces. Da is, he’s – well, he’s the same at home, but Richard told me last month that he asked to be removed as deacon.” She sighed, winding down. “That will probably come to nothing, he’d sooner hang himself, I think.” Her head snapped up, eyes wide. “Not – I don’t mean… I mean he won’t step down. But John….” She fell off, shivering, wrapped in on herself.

John felt cold and helpless, with no warmth or comfort to give. “I’m so sorry, Harry,” he said, and even the labor of that small speech was painful, his tongue stiff and sore with disuse. He stepped forward to embrace her, turning his face away from hers to spare himself she sharp smell he now recognized. 

She leaned against him, exhausted. “We can still fix it, John,” she said into his shoulder. “Da will – he wants you back. And we can – no, stop,” she said, for John had gone still. “It’s not so hopeless. We can get you back to the shipyard, I know how.”

John shook his head. “It’s… it’s not possible, Harry. It’s….” He paused, briefly overcome by the ache in his jaw and the rawness of his tongue where his teeth chafed against it, but he forced himself to continue. “It’s breach of contract. They’ll never have me. Nor will any concern in Portsmouth.”

“No, we can.” Her voice was thin and spent, but her words were clear. “I know how.” She pulled back, straightening, and hitched up the cloth bag which, he just now noticed, was slung from her shoulder.

“The Challenger,” she said. “All of the refitting has been done by Joseph Gordon and Sons.”

John frowned. “Gordon?” He knew the firm, of course; it was one of the oldest concerns in the city, though it had grown significantly since his grandfather’s time. They had tried to hire John’s father away, when he and Harry were young, but the firm had struggled in more recent years. As far as John knew, they had taken only private commissions in the past decade.

Harry’s mouth twisted. “Yes. And it’s just as you’re thinking – they were the only ones who could do the work on short notice.” 

“Oh.” John’s mind traced back over the ship, with its many peculiar fittings and additions, feeling for the places that Gordon’s workmen would have touched: cabins and closets built into the hollowed-out gunwales, whole rooms filled with miles and miles of hemp imported from Italy. The crank-powered observation platform that loomed so strangely beside the steam engine’s funnel. Most recently, the observation balloon, a strange contraption of canvas and wicker and piping that had been carried aboard only the day before. The newly-outfitted laboratories for the civilian scientists. 

“It’s the wood, John,” Harry said sharply, cutting into his mental explorations. “It’s Canadian timber they’re getting in.” She smiled again, with that same disconcerting twist that was new to him. “And that foreman they brought in from Southampton some years back is careless, so Tom Lippett says. He says everybody thinks so.” John nodded; he had heard the tale himself, but did not see to the end of the thread. “But nobody trusts the timber, any more than the work.” She paused, as if waiting for him to catch up. “If something were to go wrong,” she said at last.

John’s mind boggled. “Harry, you don’t mean to….?”

She shook her head, disgusted. “For God’s sake, no! I’d not have the deaths of any men on your head, nor on mine.” She drew forward and seized his hands. “But don’t you see, John – they _will_ inspect the ship, one last time, before casting off tomorrow, you know they will. There’s too much money in it, from the King, or the university, or….”

“The Royal Society,” John corrected quietly.

Harry waved an impatient hand. “Yes, all right, but the _point_ is.” She paused, and fixed her eyes on his face. “If the inspection discovers that a board has cracked in the hull, what do you think will happen then?”

Silently, John played it forward in his head. A poorly planed board, imperfectly matched to its neighbors, could easily crack or warp under strain, especially if it were made of softer wood to begin with. It was an ill-starred crew that set out to sea on a ship so made. Replacing that single board would be only the beginning.

“They’ll need you,” Harry said softly. “A good pair of hands, with no taint on them. Carlson knows your work. You are as steady as they come. And plenty of work to be done, on short notice.”

John thought, again, of Wyville Thomson’s threat. It was easy enough to see what would come of a delay; long before the Challenger was declared fit to sail, he would send Sherlock packing back to London, to drown himself in opium and fits of dolor. John shuddered to imagine such a future, until he recalled a moment later that he would not be there to witness it. If he chose such a course, it would be to purchase his own return to Portsmouth.

And what of Portsmouth?

It would be the ruin of Gordon and Sons, he knew that, to mar the ship as Harry was proposing. It would bring hardship to the good craftsmen of that yard, no less than the indifferent ones, for surely none of them could be let to lift a hand toward repairing the damage they themselves had made. The scandal and the outrage of it would consume the town for months to come, and a flurry of work for any trustworthy craftsmen whose reputation was unstained.

And what if, amidst all the scandal and the flurry of urgent new work, John were, ever so quietly, to return? To take up his craftsman’s tools again? To return to his family’s home each week with wages for the box over the fireplace? To once more lift his voice in song, in the pews or around a festival fire, with the men and women he had known his while life? 

What would Portsmouth do, amidst the hurly-burly, but to welcome its prodigal son home?

John imagined himself once again at his workbench, properly bundled in a coat his Gran had patched, sharing a flask of tea with the second foreman as he used to do. He flexed his hands, remembering the feel of wood grain beneath his fingers: in a bare plank, in the hard pew at church. The ghost of old hymns prickled his skin and rose like smoke through his blood.

His life in Portsmouth had often felt lonely, it was true. But standing on the barren quay, stripped down to the bone by the wind and by his own grief, John felt a violent burst of longing for the world he had thrown away, the enfolding blanket of easy fellowship and the love of his dear family. He let himself think, for the first time in many months, of his Gran’s face, dearer to him than almost any other in the world, so long forcibly sequestered in a dark corner of his heart, shrouded by his own shame. It was another face, now, that John deliberately his from his own mind’s eye.

Harry caught John’s eye, and he could see hope blooming in her face, the old radiance he remembered and loved so well.

Spring would come soon enough, with new commissions for the shipyards. The churches would help feed the destitute through the winter. John drew a good wage; perhaps now, with his skills in such demand, he would draw a better one. He would add his own coins to the collection.

“What do I do?” he asked, his voice low.

Harry bent her head to rifle through the bag on her shoulder, and then pulled out some object and held it out to John, shivering. He shivered too, as he took it, for in the freezing night, the cold metal nearly burned his hand. A short metal stake, about the width of his little finger. Reaching back into her bag, Harry produced a hammer and handed that to him as well. Looking down at the objects in his hand, John realized he could not only feel but see them. The sky had been growing imperceptibly lighter for the past several minutes, and a band of deep blue had crept up on the deep black dome of the sky, carving out dim silhouettes of the city behind them.

“It’ll have to be one on the inside,” Harry said, in a low murmur. “Otherwise, it might be taken only for vandalism.” John huffed a small, despairing laugh, which Harry ignored. “You’d best go to the aft starboard gunwale. They were just working on it last week.” 

“All right.” John straightened his shoulders and tucked both hammer and stake into the pocket of his jacket. His hand once again free, he reached out and touched her upper arm. Harry started, but then reached back toward him and pulled him into a hug. After a moment she shoved him off and began walking away, still facing him, as if she could not yet bear to turn her back.

“Get to work, then,” she said, a ghost of the old playfulness in her voice. John nodded, and tried to smile. She returned the expression, whatever it was, and then stopped walking. “See you soon?”

John nodded, biting his lip.

John recognized her smile: it was the brave one, the one she put on when things were very grim. He gave a little wave. She brought her hand up briefly, in mirror to his, then turned and walked away. He watched her retreating form, her short, bouncing strides pulling at his heart. He had missed her very much.

Harry had nearly reached the head of the quay when she abruptly ducked her head; a moment later, two men dressed for dock work came into view. John did not recognize either man at this distance, but Harry had evidently feared that they might know her; perhaps they would know John as well. He turned round and gazed out to sea, trusting his London clothes to disguise him. He felt the thump of heavy boots striking the pavement behind him, less than twenty feet behind, before the men turned off, perhaps to board another ship. He felt a punch of relief as the thrum beneath his feet faded; they had turned left, not right to where the Challenger was berthed. He swung round and glanced at the flush of light blooming over the roofs of the city. The two men might be early to work, but others would no doubt follow soon. He would have to move quickly.

John quickly scanned the shipyard, and, seeing no-one about, strode quickly to the gangplank and up onto the ship. The head of the hammer jostled against the stake in his pocket; alarmed by the low, dull chime, he took them once again in his hand, where the metal stake shot a bolt of ice along his palm. Once aboard, he slipped quickly to the far side of the stack of specimen boxes which would, as he had learned yesterday, be used to hold the samples collected by the dredging platform that loomed amidships. He leaned back against the boxes, and tried to call to mind the safest way to cross to the other end of the ship without being seen. He was hidden, here, from anyone in the shipyard, but horribly exposed to anyone else on the upper deck.

Crouching low in order to avoid attracting the eyes of anyone on the docks, John crept forward toward the hatch, then froze; somewhere in front of him to his right, a figure stirred in the gloomy obscurity of space behind the observation platform. John backed slowly into the shadow of the steam funnel and watched, alert and tense. The figure in the shadows stirred slightly but did not approach. John’s hand began to hurt where the edge of the stake bit into his palm, and he struggled to loosen his grip. He breathed slowly, silently, and was about to risk another step forward when a fresh gust of wind caught him from behind, nearly knocking him over. The figure in the shadows seemed to sway and slump, and John realized with a burst of lightness that it was no man at all, but only the observation balloon, its strange stiff folds of material swaying in the same wind that was cutting his skin to pieces beneath his clothing. The hulking collection of canvas, with its attached basket, had seemed alien and almost repellant to John yesterday as he had watched it being carried aboard, but now he nearly laughed in relief, and stood straight a moment before another gust of wind drove him back into a hunch. 

John stole past the observation platform, past the strange unearthly mass of the balloon, and crept to the mouth of the hatch. He could hear no stirrings from the main deck, so he tucked the hammer and stake firmly under his arm and clambered down the ladder, past the lightless main deck down to the lower deck, and ducked into the nearest compartment on the port side, which, as he recalled, was being used to store great bales of steel wire, and was sure to be empty of people. The compartment was completely dark, and smelled faintly of oil, and John leaned against the bulkhead and took the hammer and stake in hand once again, breathing through the deep silence.

The hatch was located about two-thirds of the way toward the stern of the ship. He was about forty feet away from the aft starboard gunwale, which was, John remembered, among the converted laboratory spaces. It would very likely be empty at this hour. The task was nearly done; five minutes and he would have the quay under his feet again.

John leaned out into the silent passageway and took in the faint glow of a lamp from a room down the hall. Someone else was down here; not even the civilian scientists would be so foolish as to leave a lamp burning unattended on board. The light came from a starboard side room only a few doors away, the purpose of which John could not call to mind. John crept to the doorway and then, hearing no noise, peered into the room.

The light in this compartment was very weak, and came from a malingering oil lamp that sat on a very large table all spread with documents and drawings. At the far end of the table, a figure was slumped over the table, apparently having falling asleep while at work. With a start, John realized that the sleeping figure was Sherlock. His curls were lost in a mass of shadow, but John recognized the hand that stretched out on the desk, the elegant long-fingered hand that had haunted both his dreams and his waking visions long before he learned its touch. 

John felt his ribs constrict. Sherlock had sometimes worked straight through the night in London, but rarely went more than a single night without sleeping; and during these past few weeks, John knew, the strain of the impending voyage had left Sherlock as worn-out and tense as John had ever known him. John felt the sweet ache of tenderness well up inside of him, and before he knew what he was doing, he had drawn forward and placed his hand in Sherlock’s hair, ruffling the dark curls. The sleeper sighed quietly but did not stir.

John’s eyes fell to the documents on the table, some of which appeared to be in Sherlock’s own hand. Next to him, Sherlock sighed more deeply, and John’s eyes fell shut as the love inside of him welled up like a vast sea, nearly pulling him under. A love which had begun that quiet night on the riverbank – when John had not known what it was that he felt, not known Sherlock’s name – had begun with a spark that came clear across the river, even though John had not had a name for it, either. That spark was Sherlock’s brilliance, his keen, agile mind, pursuing a knowledge ever more precise, ever seeking to improve itself in the crucible of the world. 

John gazed on the planes and angles of the beloved face and felt a new certainty settle into him, heavy as stone. He would not fulfill his task, spoil a plank and delay the expedition. In preventing Sherlock from joining the voyage, John might as well drive the stake through Sherlock’s very heart. John must lose Sherlock, he knew; even if John were to return to London with him, the man would be lost to the blackness inside of him. But he would not have the world lose Sherlock, his brilliance and insight and joy. He would not have Sherlock lose himself, not for any cost.

Awash in a new calm, John bent to kiss Sherlock’s hair one last time, then slipped out into the dark passageway. He took the ladder rung by rung, hammer and stake clenched firmly against his ribs. The sky was lighter now, but John held himself erect as he walked steadily across the upper deck to the gangplank. There was no longer any reason to hide; there was no reason to dissemble. The ship would prove sound at its final inspection in a few hours’ time, and would depart. Portsmouth would remain closed to him.

By the time John’s feet touched the dock, another resolution had fallen into place. He walked to the end of the dock and stared out over the harbor, at the wheeling gulls and the endless churn of the water. He looked down at the hammer and stake and his hand and thought, involuntarily, of Harry, who had given him so many gifts over the course of his lifetime, who probably sensed that these would be the last. He swallowed and gave a small nod, then drew back his arm and threw the hammer and stake into the sea. He did not follow them with his eyes, but heard the twin splashes a few seconds later. He pushed his freezing hands into his coat pockets, and his finger again brushed the small vial of belladonna.

John pulled the vial out of his pocket and examined it, tilting it to watch the oily slide of the liquid within it. There were other possibilities, he knew; factories in the north, although the thought of living so far from the water made him feel ill. He might be able sign articles aboard another departing ship, although his hands had long since gone soft, and it seemed unlikely that anyone would believe him competent to serve. If he sold his clothing, he could perhaps buy passage on a ship to Australia. But each of these possible avenues seemed dim and desiccate, already withered; John had choked them off long ago. It was as if Sherlock were Hades, and had fed him pomegranate in the form of happiness; a life spent laboring far from those whom he already loved was not something he could countenance. 

A sharp front of wind off the water brought a wave crashing only a few feet below John’s feet, and the spray of the ocean peppered his face with ice-like needles. He licked his lips, tasting the salt of the water. 

There was always the sea itself.

John closed his eyes against a wave of horror, and discovered as it receded an even deeper stillness, peaceful like the cold, grey stretch of the water to the horizon. He opened his eyes, and with a faint dry chuckle, John bid goodbye to Doctor Trevelyan and the Baroness as he had bid goodbye to Harry a moment before, and tossed the small vial into the waves below. He had been born a sea-man, and that is how he would die; the water would take him, just as his father had taught him to fear that it would, when John was only a small child and under firm instructions to keep well away from the quay’s edge. He would wait and watch the Challenger depart, as a last goodbye to Sherlock, and then take to the water. Even if anyone noticed him as he jumped, it would not delay the voyage or cause a fuss.

John shivered and wrapped his coat around himself more tightly as he prepared to wait.

Slowly, the halo of the coming morning began to spread across the sky into John’s field of vision where he gazed westward over the ocean. Deep blue gave way to pale lavender; John watched as it was briefly subsumed by a rising tide of radiant gold before the coming day soothed it back to blue. 

Behind him, John felt as much as heard the growing swell of activity in the dockyard: shipwrights and engineers arriving for another ordinary day’s labor, and the crack of the Challenger’s gangplank as sailors and deckhands and inspectors tramped onboard and back to land. They left him alone, as he knew they would, stock-still and finely dressed and alone at the end of a busy pier. He felt, oddly, protected, swathed in isolation, and with it the growing certainty that nothing would ever touch him again.

A moment later, the sound of boots on the ground beside him scraped uncomfortably against the edge of John’s newfound calm. He felt a hot flare of irritation but kept his gaze fixed forward. Other people were, after all, allowed to stand at the end of the dock. 

“You’d best go aboard,” said the newcomer. His voice was deep and dry, like gravel rattling in a cup. “They’ll be lifting anchor within the hour.”

John shook his head slightly, but did not drop his gaze from the horizon, where the night-colored water was beginning to absorb some of the blue of the brightening firmament.

“I said you’ll miss your ship,” the man said, more loudly, as if John were a bit slow.

John turned, now, his calm broken. “No, I won’t,” he said, firm and flat and final.

The man had a weathered face, and a short grey beard that scrubbed his jawline into indistinctness. In in the grim light of predawn, John could not read his expression.

“I mean.” John looked down at his shoes. They were well above the waterline, but spray of the water had reached them, somehow, flecking the fine leather with tiny salt specks. “I am not going. It’s not my ship.” He pursed his lips, then looked back up at the man challengingly. He was fine. He had found resignation; he would find it again. 

But the man only looked back at him, tipping his head up and down as he looked John over slowly. John recognized him, now, as he recalled the gesture from the day before; he had seen the man onboard the Challenger. He had been on the upper deck yesterday afternoon, supervising the loading of the great canvas observation balloon, and John had watched him as he had watched his crewmen, because it was easier than watching Sherlock abuse the first mate about the situation of the sample boxes.

At last, the man met his eyes again, and inclined his head as if in concession. “Just here to see it off, then?”

John only nodded, misery stopping his mouth as effectively as either medicine or resolution had ever done. 

“But you would give your eyeteeth for it,” the man replied.

John supposed it wasn’t so amazing a deduction. “I would,” he said flatly, and then bit back a hysterical laugh as he imagined the old saw coming literally true: going to the Baroness or to Lord Holmes or some other impossibly powerful person, trading in another part of himself to continue on in Sherlock’s company. It should have been morbid, imagining himself broken up piece by piece. It should have been terrifying, but instead it only joined the slow sad march of his other thoughts, grey and anonymous in grief. Was it so strange, so obscene, that he would consider it if he could, bargaining himself away in bits and pieces to hold onto the only life he had ever loved?

“It’s hardly the last ship that will ever sail,” the man said gently, breaking in on his thoughts. John only laughed grimly and shook his head. “And there are the factories, up north. I haven’t been myself, but I hear they are always in need of a reliable man.”

“That they are,” John said grimly, feeling at last a faint flare of anger as he stared holes through the toes of his shoes. “Any man, doesn’t matter which.”

“Oh.” The man’s voice settled, deepened, into recognition of some kind. “So you’re one of those.”

John only nodded. He didn’t know what kind the man meant, but he supposed he was one. Or he might as well be that as anything else. Right now, he wasn’t anything at all.

“I do know what it’s like, son,” and here John bristled, a streak of anger scraping back against the smooth comforting pull of the man’s words. He wasn’t this man’s son. He wasn’t anything.

“Do you always talk at such length to strangers?” He snapped. The uncivil words were hardly out of his mouth before shame was twisting in his throat. But the man seemed to accept this declaration as it was meant, and refocused his gaze toward the horizon over John’s shoulder. The corner of John’s brain that could be troubled to care at all about this stranger supposed that this was the man’s way of giving him a bit of privacy. 

“I –” John began, but discovered he could not offer a genuine apology. “It’s only that I came here for a bit of peace.”

“I can see that,” the man replied mildly. “Or more than a bit.”

John hung his head. 

“There is no shame in thinking it,” his interlocutor said gently. 

John shook his head, eyes still cast down. “I’ve never been a coward before.”

“Grief doesn’t make you a coward, son,” the man responded. 

Was it so obvious? John thought back to how easily Sherlock had seen most everything about him written in his face and his hands and the scuff of his shoes; but then Sherlock read everyone that way. Lord Holmes had read him too, had seen even those things that Sherlock had missed. He had made mistakes, of course; they both had. But John had lost track of what it was like, to be looked at by anyone who wasn’t a Holmes.

He had hadn’t minded it so much this time, he realized, being called “son.”

“I’m not a coward,” he said, because it was true, and because he had forgotten the pleasure of saying things aloud. “There’s just.” He cleared his throat. “Very little left for me. Here.” 

The man kept his eyes out to sea, yet his attention was on John. “I felt that way myself, once,” he said, his voice very calm. “It wasn’t very long ago.” He turned once again to John. “Going up with the balloons changed things for me.”

John remembered now, remembered this soft-voiced grey-bearded man barking orders from beside the gangplank as the two workmen as they hauled the balloon on board.

“It can hold a person?” he asked.

The man nodded. “The one we loaded onto the ship yesterday is a small one, but the bigger balloons can carry two men at a time.”

John blinked, astonished. “But how does it get off the ground?”

The man looked back at John in surprise for a moment before answering. “Steam. The bottom of the balloon is open, and there is a brazier and a tank of water; the steam is so light that it makes the balloon rise.”

John could not have believed it, if he had not spent the last several months with Sherlock. Even so, it was hard to countenance, this idea that vaporized water could be so light as to lift a man – or even two – through the air. 

John shook his head in wonderment. “That’s incredible. How high can you go?”

The man’s face shattered into a net of wrinkles as he grinned widely. “You could come see for yourself, you know.”

John stared. “You would let me watch a balloon flight?”

The man held his eyes, smile softening. “I would let you fly one, if you can learn. We’re a good crew, but a small one. Would you join us?”

John closed his eyes, overwhelmed by lightness. It was too much, he would burst at the seams. He imagined himself gliding over the tops of trees, up among the birds, drifting over mountains. There would perhaps be no limit to what he could do. “You – you are offering me a job.”

The man chuckled. “I’m offering you a _chance_ , son. I like your face, but I’d need to see your work.” He smiled again. “And it would help if I knew your name.”

John caught himself still staring in wonder, and thrust out his hand. “John Watson.”

The man took his hand in a firm grip and shook it. “James Templer. All right, then, John Watson. You’re not a coward. But there’s many a man who’s no coward, but still prefers the quiet life. Are you afraid of danger?”

John dropped his eyes to his salt-speckled shoes and their ruined finish and found himself smiling. “I could do with some adventure, actually.”

The man gave a gravelly laugh. “Well, that’s fine, a lot of men like adventure. But there’s a fair share of tedium, too. A lot of standing about and waiting for the wind to change. You’ll need some patience to temper your hot blood.”

John thought of Sherlock, then, his dazzling brilliance and energy, his fretful rage at being made to wait even a moment for something he wanted. John supposed he was hot-blooded, too, though he had so often been the cooling balm to Sherlock’s heat. What a pair they had been. John loved him so much that it hurt. 

“Not too bad,” he said, eyes still downward. “Patient enough.”

The man chuckled. “I hope so. There’s a lot of nothing to be done, out on the airfields. Can you tell a good story?”

"Yes," John said, feeling his voice rising up raw and newborn in his throat. He lifted his eyes to the man’s face, squinting into the light of the newly-risen sun. “Yes, I can.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * First of all: don’t forget that there’s also an epilogue!
> 
> * The _Challenger_ expedition departed December 23, 1872 from Portsmouth, crossing all the major oceans and stopping over in various places on six continents (the ship traveled in the vicinity of the Antarctic circle, but not to Antarctica proper) before making landfall in England again in May of 1876. The importance of the expeditions’ findings – which continued to be published for nearly 20 years after the end of the voyage – are hard to overstate: many of the specimens collected were the first of their kind, and the research conducted on board laid the groundwork for the discipline of oceanography.
> 
> * It is, in fact, incredibly unlikely that an historical Sherlock Holmes would have been able to find a spot for an historical John Watson on the voyage, for the _Challenger_ did have a scientific illustrator as part of its very small civilian crew. We know much less about him than about the other five, but Wyville Thomson – the Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh and the supervisor of the scientific civilian staff ~~and actually a botanist himself, oops~~ – considered him a particular friend, and even shared a cabin with him for the entire four year voyage. (Thomson had a wife and children at home, but I leave you to draw your own conclusions.) In any case, it does seem highly unlikely that Thomson would throw over his own special friend to make room for Sherlock’s. This mysterious illustrator’s name? John James Wild. No, really.
> 
> * The timber sourcing problem to which Harry alludes was a real one: by the mid-19th century, England has exhausted most of its hardwood timber reserves and started importing timber from Scandinavia (which was very expensive) and from Canada (which was cheaper but also of considerably lower quality). By the end of the century the majority of the shipbuilding in England had shifted to the northern ports because it was cheaper and easier for them to get hold of materials.
> 
> * There was not yet an official division of the British Army dedicated to aeronautics at the time of the _Challenger_ ’s departure. In fact, the Royal Engineers worked unsuccessfully throughout the 1860s and 70s to persuade members of the British Army to invest in balloons for reconnaissance purposes, but were met with indifference. Only in 1878 (two years after the _Challenger_ expedition returned) did the War Office allocate funds for developing and building a balloon for military purposes, under the supervision of James Templer, a division that later became known as the School of Ballooning. So the existence of this balloon is a bit improbable, though not impossible, since some of the sources I looked at do claim (there are a lot of contradictions among, them so it’s hard to know) that Templer owned a balloon of his own before the school was founded.
> 
> * I’ve also slightly fudged Templer’s explanation to John about how the _Challenger_ ’s balloon works: a balloon in the second half of the 19th century would have been inflated by hydrogen or coal gas, which gives a great deal more lift than steam or smoke. Steam came back in the 20th century after it became clear that filling your balloon with flammable substances was a bad idea (think _Hindenburg_.) Once again, strict accuracy with regard to historical progression gives way to metaphor.


	9. Epilogue: Aldershot, 1895

It was an unusually warm day, for April, and the park was crowded: not only the usual tourists, who moved in slow, regulated procession in consultation with their guide-pamphlets, but families taking in the sun and young couples strolling arm-in-arm. The lively swell of laughter and conversation was an odd match for the bare, clawlike trees and the solemn monuments, whose bronze faces and stone plinths rose like stern, cold pillars out of a sea of human warmth.

He stood out from the crowds of the park, as he stood out everywhere. His hair was silvered over, his nose grown more hawklike, but still unmistakeable, slim and straight and striking. The energy of the holiday-makers seemed neither to catch him up nor to disturb him as he wove his own way across the fallow public square. When the press of people before him became too thick, he would pause, and allow his eyes to rove over the crowd speculatively, as if working out a calculation in his mind. 

He stopped at each monument in turn, scanning it carefully as if harvesting the words from their cut stone or bronze embossment. He seemed untroubled by the gathered crowd in front of the bronze soldier who stood at attention to commemorate the lives lost in the Boer War.

But the crowds were thinner at the edge of the park, and he stood by himself, as straight and lonely as the barren trees on the fallow green, as he paused to read over the unprepossessing granite square that stood there.

********

On 23rd August 1878, the balloon _PIONEER_ made its first ascent, and with it launched  
not only the ROYAL ENGINEERS SCHOOL OF BALLOONING but also the DREAMS OF A NATION. This  
monument stands to honor the labors of those members of the ROYAL ENGINEERS who, under the leadership of  
CAPTAIN JAMES TEMPLER  
brought this great achievement to fruition.  
  
THOMAS ATKINS  
JOSEPH BURDOCK  
JOHN CAPPER  
ALFRED HODGES  
ROBERT PETERSEN  
JOHN WATSON  
LAWRENCE YOUNG

********

It was the last monument in the park; a few more steps brought him to the road, where he turned toward the city center and left the park, its crowds, and its monuments behind him.

\---

\---

That is the only time I have seen him, since I stepped off the deck of the _Challenger_ so many years ago. He did not see me; he had no reason to look for James Lindsay in an Aldershot Park. I had known I might see him that afternoon, for the local folk had been astir for days, eager for their chance to hear the lectures that had made him the toast of the Columbian Exposition two years prior. Looking back, I sometimes cannot help but wish that I had approached and spoken to him. But I felt then - and I still believe - that it would have been a mistake. Our lives had both moved on, far beyond what they had been when last we parted; and I did not want the first words I ever spoke to him to come so far after the dissolution of our intimacy. And so I let him pass by, let that precious portion of the past remain intact, and kept my footing firm in the course on which chance and Providence have since directed me. After all, the account of my brief, blessed time spent in the company of Sherlock Holmes is only one of the stories I have that is drawn from my own adventures, even if it remains the best. 

\---

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From the Robert Fagles translation of _The Iliad_ :
> 
> “If only I were the man I was / years ago, when I cut down rugged Ereuthalion… / but the gods won’t give us all their gifts at once. / If I was a young man then, now old age dogs my steps.” (IV.368-370)  
> This is Nestor, assuring Agamemnon that he will do his part to help the Achaeans take Troy, even though he can no longer fight. I first came across this line in Fagles, but it appears not to have originated with him; the same phrase appears in Edward Earl of Derby’s blank-verse rendition of the Iliad, published by John Murray in 1865: “but the Gods / On man bestow not all their gifts at once” (p. 123)
> 
> The same phrase (or a version of it) appears twice more in Fagles’ translation of the Homeric epics. The first is in Book 13, when Polydamas tries to coax Hector into calming down, saying: “Impossible man! Won’t you listen to reason? / Just because some god exalts you in battle / you think you can beat the rest at tactics too. / How can you hope to garner all the gifts at once?” (XIII.839-842) And again in the _Odyssey_ , in the beginning of Book 8, Odysseus chastises one of the boasting Phaeacians: “You’re a reckless fool, I see that. So, / the gods don’t hand out all their gifts at once, / not build and brains and flowing speech to all.”
> 
> Homeric superstar [thisprettywren](http://archiveofourown.org/users/thisprettywren/pseuds/thisprettywren) tells me that these last two cases are very freely translated: not only the words but the sentence structures of the original Greek tell against rendering it in the same way as Nestor’s line from Book 4. I suspect Fagles simple really liked the phrase. I like it too.
> 
> * The School of Ballooning was founded in Chatham (as I mentioned in the notes to the last chapter) but was relocated to Aldershot in 1882. It moved again, to Farnborough, between 1904 and 1906, but would still have been in Aldershot in 1895.
> 
> * Aldershot was primarily known, in the later 19th and early 20th century, as a military town. After a garrison was established there in 1854 during the Crimean war, the small village grew rapidly and became an operations base for several divisions of the British Army. There is now a military museum there, which opened in 1984; the monument park in this story is my own invention.
> 
> * The Columbian Exposition is another name for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, so called because it commemorated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the New World. It was a truly massive event that dwarfed even previous World’s Fairs, and involved a panoply of exhibits, entertainments, demonstrations and performances that ran for over six month and drew millions of visitors from around the country and the world. Sherlock Holmes, adventurer-scientist with an eye to the ever-improving future of human understanding, would have been a welcome addition to the Fair’s program, whether he there to recount his experiences on the _Challenger_ or to detail some more recent line of research. 
> 
> * There is one last little Easter egg in this epilogue. This one isn’t a reference to another text, but more of a nod to fandom itself, and to Sherlock Holmes fandom in particular. If you spot it, I will… shower you with joy and enthusiasm?
> 
> * …and that’s really it! I am so, so grateful to all of you for sticking with this story, whether you started it earlier today, or have been subscribed from the beginning (and had no idea how long a wait you’d be in for), or picked up with the penultimate chapter (and had no idea how long a wait you’d be in for). I am especially grateful to chapbook and to ancientreader for really thoughtful and substantive comments on so many chapters, and to abrae for late-stage cheerleading. These last few chapters have benefited in all sorts of small but crucial ways from [redscudery](http://archiveofourown.org/users/redscudery/pseuds/redscudery)’s advice; I could not ask for a better Vic(-torian)-picker! And I absolutely cannot overstate my gratitude to the endlessly patient, generous and talented [patternofdefiance](http://archiveofourown.org/users/patternofdefiance/pseuds/patternofdefiance), who helped me wrestle an unwieldy storyline and messy character arcs into place, and who contributed some crucial threads to the final tapestry. It would be wrong to say that the finished story would have been less good without her, because the truth is that I would have simply thrown in the towel without her. The warmth and clarity she has unfailingly brought to bear, when looking at drafts or talking me through a tricky plot transition, reminds me that – while Sherlock Holmes may need only a conductor of light – most of us, or at least I myself, need a generous and insightful friend to bring some light of their own.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Until the Sea Shall Free Them](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4181496) by [fleetwood_mouse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fleetwood_mouse/pseuds/fleetwood_mouse)




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